Next Refactor

[gilesknap]

Now that we have ibek and ibek-support 3.0 we are considering a refactor of some other parts of the epics-containers. Broadly speaking this is likely to take the form of:

• Switch to ArgoCD for managing IOCs in the cluster.
• Switch to docker compose for managing IOCs in local docker/podman and developer containers.

At present we use ec to do local deployments and this just means that there is custom python code that takes a few values out of the IOC helm charts and invokes docker to set up the necessary volumes etc. Switching to compose allows us to:

• deprecate the custom code in ec
  • we may keep ec for monitoring and diagnostics but probably drop it's 'deploy' functions
• describe the volumes/network etc. in a standard way that is widely supported/understood
• easily launch a number of IOCs and phoebus in a local network for isolated testing
• give developers freedom to make any configuration changes they wish, unconstrained by what ec currently does

We should also consider using compose to describe our developer containers. This would:

• move the configuration of volume mounts and container runtime options into a compose.yml instead of devcontainer.json
  • thus developers can re-use what they have learn from using compose in when doing local deployments
• provide a trivial way of launching generic IOC tickit simulation environments

Other things to consider:

• we have a requirement for 'one off' IOCs. i.e. an non-generic singleton. Such IOCs should be described in a repo that allows them to be deployed directly out of that repo with no additional 'beamline/domain' repo requried. Such a repo could easily contain the compose.yml required for local deployment / developer container config, but how would this work in ArgoCD.
• we currently use a Helm glob to ingest any IOC configuration files and this requires a helm package before helm install - we need a replacement mechansim for this in ArgoCD most likely.

[gilesknap]

@coretl this is my take on our conversation - please add anything I have missed