The solution

This project aims to provide tools and instructions for a different approach to the problem, thanks to the HPC community who has solved it a long time ago! This is kind of a portage of their solution to Kubernetes.

The idea is that instead of building the needed applications and libraries into the container images, you can store all of them in a read-only shared library on a ROX volume (read-only, but by many pods simultaneously), and mount this volume inside the Pods at spawn time.

Then, leveraging Linux Environment Modules with Lmod, it gets easy to dynamically "load" what you need, when you need it, instantly…​ Pretty neat, uh?

This is a very high-level schematic of what's happening:

And with Easybuild, you have access to a few thousands of ready to use (or more accurately to compile, we’ll come to that) software packages, plus the full machinery to easily create you owns.