C2MON SCADA deployment on CERN cloud infrastructure

The CERN Control and Monitoring Platform (C2MON) is an open-source platform for industrial controls data acquisition, monitoring, control and data publishing. C2MON's high-availability, redundant capabilities make it particularly suited for a large, geographically scattered context such as CERN. The C2MON platform relies on the Java technology stack at all levels of its architecture, and previously imposed the deployment of binary archives that needed to be unpacked and executed locally. Since end of 2016, CERN offers a platform as a service (PaaS) solution based on RedHat Openshift. Initially envisioned at CERN for web application hosting, Openshift can be leveraged to host any software stack due to its adoption of the Docker container technology, including the Java dependency stack that C2MON is based upon. In order to make C2MON more scalable and compatible with Cloud Computing, it was necessary to containerize C2MON components for the Docker container platform. Containerization is a logical process that forces one to rethink a distributed architecture in terms of decoupled micro-services and clearly identify dependencies in terms of services, storage requirements, configuration and connectivity, without ever imposing any physical considerations, which would in any case jeopardize the redeployment of the distributed architecture in another cloud environment. In return, the deployment of the said distributed architecture becomes reproducible and entirely automatable. This paper explains the challenges met and the principles behind containerizing a server-centric Java application, demonstrating how simple it has now become to deploy C2MON in any cloud-centric environment (ranging from Openstack Magnum to Docker Swarm, and of course Openshift).