Progress on national plan for Containers and K8s

Members of our team recently advanced the Australian BioCommons Software and Containers project by participating in two strategic meetings at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth. The March events drew together partners who are contributing to the national roll out of a common bioinformatics software containerisation and meta-data standard, and a common implementation standard of the open-source container-orchestration system Kubernetes for use by Australian life scientists.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes is currently used by many individual research groups in Australia, but there is no currently no communication, coordination or local support for the service.

Two days of strategic discussions took place during the Australian BioCommons Software and Containers Workshop and the ARDC-funded National Kubernetes Core Services Planning Meeting. The workshop reviewed the ongoing progress of a large collaborative project led by the Australian BioCommons to identify the use cases for a coherent environment around containers and to coordinate the essential elements required to build the interoperable national infrastructure. The Planning Meeting discussed the implementation of a national eResearch program for supporting container orchestration and the use of Kubernetes.

A large group representing significant stakeholders including Pawsey, Australian BioCommons, ARDC, NCI, AARNet, ELIXIR Europe (remote attendance), CSIRO, Monash University, Melbourne University, Intersect, University of NSW, University of Tasmania/ TPAC, University of Queensland/ RCC, QCIF and University of Sydney worked together to define their next steps in the national Kubernetes plan.

These strategic meetings followed on from ten days of hands-on training by HPCNow! to upskill the Pawsey operations and end-user support teams in the Kubernetes system. Read more about Pawsey’s growing expertise in container orchestration solutions here.

We’ll keep you updated on how this coordinated effort will provide new bioinformatics solutions for Australian research community.