Software Containers Will Replace Embedded Software

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Technology Trends

Interview with Harry Forbes on Software Containers

In an interview with Chris Cunnane at the ARC Orlando Forum, Harry Forbes, ARC Advisory Group’s Research Director, Automation, spoke about software containers and container orchestration.  He shed some light on what software containers and container orchestration are and their impact on the industry.  He also talked about ARC’s research contribution in this area.  The video of the interview is here.

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What is a software container?

A software container is a package of application code bundled in a container with all its dependencies.  And this is a layered architecture, or layered structure, so at the bottom you have the lower level dependencies, say operating system version, database version, etc., and at the top layer you have the application version.  So, that layered infrastructure comes with a bunch of other features, like a repository, a runtime environment, and a deployment capability, and it lets you build and deploy distributed applications at scale in ways that people have never been able to do before.

What is orchestration?

That's kind of the next step because orchestration is required to manage large deployments of containers, especially if it comes from the cloud environment.  In the cloud environment, you need a way to manage an application as it changes versions, and as it changes loads and so forth.  And in order to do that, the open source community and the cloud community have converged on a single open source project called Kubernetes to manage the orchestration of containers.

Impact of Software Architecture on the Industry

Harry’s point of view on this was, “What we see is that the companies in the automation space are starting to use this more and more in their advanced applications for analytics, IoT, and distributed applications, but it's really just beginning for them.  I would say there's going to be a lot of work in this area because of other industries, such as automotive and telecommunications where software is becoming much more of a component in products, and the only way that people are going to be able to manage this kind of complex distributed system at scale, at a huge scale over a long period of time, is to use orchestrated, containerized software at the edge.

And that's a little bit of a problem because the resource requirements for Kubernetes fit the Cloud very well, but they don't fit the edge very well.  So there's a lot of research going on in that area to drive an edge-cloud kind of harmonization so that we can orchestrate the edge the same way we can orchestrate the Cloud, or at least with the same capabilities.”

ARC’s Market Research in This Area

At the ARC Forum 2020, Harry spoke about the research ARC is doing in the area.  He said, “We're doing a lot of research into the edge, and especially the industrial edge obviously, because that's where most of our market research plays, and I think we'll also be extending that into other kinds of applications.  But primarily right now our IoT edge research is looking into this area and the technologies and markets that will be driving orchestrating containers to the edge.”

What the Future Holds for Software Containers

According to Harry, “Another point I would make here is that over time, my personal opinion is that, this containerized software is going to replace much of what is today embedded software.  In other words, when you have an automation system, you have a base operating system that is provided with a runtime by the vendor, and then the end user adds a bunch of applications through the toolsets that the automation supplier provides.  In the long run, the layers of embedded software are going to shrink down and much more of this application software is going to be containerized, and we'll be using a common technology for management and deployment of those containers.

I think this is going to be a really big thing.  It kind of standardizes, if you will, the ability of people to have distributed applications with compute power.  In kind of the way Windows Operating System/Windows desktops did in the 1980s – you had a standardized environment.  This is now more like a standardized cloud environment that is going across all the cloud providers, but I think is going to very strongly influence what we do in the edge and especially the industrial edge.”

 

 

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