A Real-Time Container Architecture for Dependable Distributed Embedded Applications

Container technologies such as Docker and Linux Containers (lxc) have become common tools in modern software engineering practice. They provide a dynamic and lightweight mechanism for software isolation and resource control, e.g. for continuous integration jobs or as app execution context. We adapt containers to industrial domains to offer enhanced reliability and legacy compatibility for distributed embedded applications. We describe a cross-domain real-time container architecture for dependable distributed embedded applications with criticality of timing requirements ranging from hard to non real-time. Through containers the proposed architecture isolates the software components from the system and from each other and only provides resources and inter-component communication explicitly demanded in each component's description. This enforces the interfaces and enables quality assurance and legacy compatibility. We provide a platform-independent model of the real-time container architecture but also describe a concrete lxc-based realization which conforms to this model.