The State of Containerization in CERN Accelerator Controls

In industry, containers have dramatically changed the way system administrators deploy and manage applications. Developers are gradually switching from delivering monolithic applications to microservices. Using containerization solutions provides many advantages, such as: applications running in an isolated manner, decoupled from the operating system and its libraries; run-time dependencies, including access to persistent storage, are clearly declared. However, introducing these new techniques requires significant modifications of existing computing infrastructure as well as a cultural change. This contribution will explore practical use cases for containers and container orchestration within the CERN Accelerator Controls domain. We will explore challenges that have been arising in this field for the past two years and technical choices that we have made to tackle them. We will also outline the foreseen future developments.