Building, securing, sharing containers: Paths towards a sustainable ecosystem for admins, users, applications

Containers have become a popular approach to package software applications with all their libraries and other dependencies. This makes them easier to maintain, update, and distribute and enables new ways of managing the software lifecycle. Over time, container repositories have been developed for sharing applications and entire software stacks. However, with it a whole new world of questions and challenges has emerged around the management of containers, their integration into existing systems and workflows, user management, security and permissions, network and storage integration, etc. This BoF session will feature a few short presentations from organisations which have adopted containers in their compute environments and they will share their experience, challenges, and success stories. These will highlight aspects around the implementation of containers in HPC and AI environments, batch and K8 platforms, security and secure software supply chains, storage integration and adption of DevSecOps/GitOps/Platform Engineering approaches to application lifecycle management. These topics will be relevant for anyone using or planning to deploy platforms for scientific computing, high performance computing, data analytics, or artificial intelligence and leveraging containers for the management software stack and/or the applications running on the system. The presentations are designed to encourage engagement with the audience and trigger questions and discussion and the sharing of ideas and experiences. At the end this session, you will have learned how some of the leading HPC and AI organisations in Australia build, secure, share and maintain their container platforms and you can become part of this growing community.