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- physical servers - traditional server installation on top of OS.
- virtual machines - improved scalability and overall hardware-resource utilization and centralized administrative tasks.
- containers - cloud virtualization that benefit benefiting from a more efficient abstraction layer than virtual machines.
When organizations are in the initial stage of (re-)defining their IT infrastructure, it is commonly recognized that after virtualization, containerization is the next logical step in the evolution of IT infrastructure. A container is a "lightweight" abstraction layer on top of the host operating system. Multiple containers share the machine’s operating system kernel and do not require the overhead of associating an operating system within each application. While we simplify Delft-FEWS for use in the cloudwith containers, running Delft-FEWS on physical hardware / virtual machines remains fully supported.
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Similar installation steps to regular installation
Delft-FEWS system installations on physical hardware / VMs are currently done by organizing a central database, installing RPMs / MSIs / unzipping the binaries, setting OS environment variables and starting a launcher service. Installations in the cloud are not much different. A general difference is that cloud installations are controlled using data driven yaml / json configuration files to apply the needed actions. In comparison with VMs, containers bring reduced start-up time, more compute capacity, more flexibility, fault isolation, ease of management, simplified security and reduced costs. The operational benefits for Delft-FEWS systems are also in line with the Roadmap plans for automation of installations with less needless customization, better auto-scaling and more flexible testing. We prefer using linux containers as much as possible. Whether linux containers can be used may depend on the requirements of the forecast model. Any Windows-based forecast models can be separately run on Windows hardware, Windows VMs (or in a Windows docker container).
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