[Centos-automotive-sig] Linux on vehicles vs Kubernetes on vehicles

Wed Mar 9 14:52:37 UTC 2022
Leigh Griffin <lgriffin at redhat.com>

Hey Ali!

Thanks for the great insight here, it's something I have thought about
myself a number of times. See more inline!

Leigh

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 2:34 PM Ali Ok <aliok at redhat.com> wrote:

> Thanks Alexander. It makes much more sense now.
>
> We believe that deploying applications in the car via containers is a good
>> idea for a couple of core reasons:
>
> I saw no references to containers on the SIG related pages. Is running
> containers in the car a stretch goal, or not in the scope of the SIG?
>

If you check out https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Automotive
you can read the charter which states the SIG *is meant to be a neutral
public space for collaboration between third parties interested in open
development of software targeted at in-vehicle automotive use cases. *

To that end, containers running within a car is something that would be a
welcome discussion and contribution and I'd love to get experts like you
and others engaged!

>
> I know it is very early on the project, but I am looking forward to seeing
> any demos :)
>
> Also, as a side effect, what would be exciting for me as a consumer is,
> using the smartphone analogy I saw around smart cars, the future where
> people mod their cars with custom software they buy on an app store. Like
> you flash ECUs for better HP these days, but with verified software on a
> button click :)
>
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 2:11 PM Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 11:52 PM Ali Ok <aliok at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I recently read a number of articles about how to offload workloads onto
>>> containers that run on vehicles. TheChief IO article here [0] summarizes
>>> some of the things tried out there and these are the experiments I've read
>>> in detail:
>>>
>>> - Mercedes-Benz did a POC [1] where they run containers in a vehicle to
>>> run relevant tasks. The focus here is on the development and CI/CD of these
>>> software.
>>>
>>> - Denso had a similar POC [2] [3]. They ran an entire Kubernetes cluster
>>> in the vehicle. Again, the focus here is the development ease and CI/CD.
>>> Development teams simply develop and distribute software just like a web
>>> application. There's also mentions of used concepts like digital twins,
>>> request queuing (in the vehicle when offline) and few other interesting
>>> concepts.
>>>
>>> How do these efforts align or relate with the automotive initiative?
>>> What I understand from CentOS automotive SIG and the POCs I mentioned
>>> above is that there are a lot of overlapping areas (being independent of
>>> the underlying hardware, faster software distribution, etc.) done in
>>> different levels (OS/Kube).
>>>
>>
>> Some of this aligns well with our current initiative, while the other
>> seems wildly unrealistic to me.
>>
>> We believe that deploying applications in the car via containers is a
>> good idea for a couple of core reasons:
>>
>>  * More isolation between apps at runtime means more robust, safe, secure
>> software.
>>  * Containerized applications can be updated and managed independently of
>> each other and the host os version.
>>  * Containerization enforces a development model with strict interface
>> boundaries, similar to what you'd call a "microarchitecture" in the cloud
>> (although not necessarily using the exact same tech). This matches what the
>> expected development model is in the new "Software Defined Vehicle" world.
>>  * The abstracted interfaces described above allow containers to run
>> outside of the actual car, using virtualized components for the rest of the
>> car. This is great for doing CI and development in the cloud and on a
>> developers local machine.
>>
>> Kubernetes is highly valuable in this model both for the CI/dev
>> environment and for running the cloud side of the services required for a
>> network-connected car.
>>
>> However, running kubernetes itself in the car itself is not a great idea.
>> The requirements that the code running in the vehicle is operating under
>> are very different from the cloud. For functionally safe code like this you
>> must know exactly ahead of time exactly what is running where and when, in
>> a predictable, repeatable fashion, ideally with a minimum of unnecessary
>> code running (as everything has to be validated in a very expensive
>> process). The dynamical nature of kubernetes just isn't a great fit, as
>> well as the high resource requirement and the fact that most of the
>> abstractions it provides wrt multi-node distribution and management just
>> isn't needed.
>>
>> Our plan is instead to run containers in the car more directly, managed
>> using systemd.
>>
>> --
>> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>>  Alexander Larsson                                Red Hat, Inc
>>        alexl at redhat.com         alexander.larsson at gmail.com
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>>
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