Eclipse Ankaios¶
Scope¶
Eclipse Ankaios provides workload and container orchestration for automotive High Performance Computing (HPC) software. While it can be used for various fields of applications, it is developed from scratch for automotive use cases and provides a slim, yet powerful solution to manage containerized applications. It supports various container runtimes with Podman as the first one, but other container runtimes and even native applications can be supported. Eclipse Ankaios is independent of existing communication frameworks like SOME/IP, DDS, or REST API.
Eclipse Ankaios manages multiple nodes and virtual machines with a single unique API in order to start, stop, configure, and update containers and workloads. It provides a central place to manage automotive applications with a setup consisting of one server and multiple agents. Usually one agent per node connects to one or more runtimes that are running the workloads.
Next steps¶
- For first steps see installation and quickstart.
- An overview how Ankaios works is given on the architecture page.
- A tutorial Sending and receiving vehicle signals demonstrates the use of Ankaios with some workloads.
- The API is described in the reference section.
- For contributions have a look at the contributing pages.
Background¶
Eclipse Ankaios follows the UNIX philosophy to have one tool for one job and do that job well. It does not depend on a specific init system like systemd but can be started with any init system. It also does not handle persistency but can use an existing automotive persistency handling, e.g. provided by AUTOSAR Adaptive.
The workloads are provided access to the Eclipse Ankaios API using access control and thus are able to dynamically reconfigure the system. One possible use case is the dynamic startup of an application that is only required in a particular situation such as a parking assistant. When the driver wants to park the car, a control workload can start the parking assistant application. When the parking is finished, the parking assistant workload is stopped again.
Eclipse Ankaios also provides a CLI that allows developers to develop and test configurations. In order to gain compatibility with Kubernetes, Eclipse Ankaios accepts pod specifications.
An optional fleet connector can use the Eclipse Ankaios API to connect to a cloud-based software update system, which allows an OEM to manage a fleet of vehicles and provide new states to Eclipse Ankaios in order to update single or all applications.
In order to support the Automotive SPICE process, Eclipse Ankaios comes with requirements tracing supported by OpenFastTrace.