Tutorials Introduction

Welcome to the epics-containers tutorial series. These tutorials introduce you to building, deploying and managing containerized EPICS IOCs. They are self-contained and assume no prior experience with the framework.

The series builds up in two halves, in toctree order:

• Workstation track — run everything locally with podman and docker compose, starting from a ready-made example and working up to building your own Generic IOC. No cluster required.

• Cluster track — move the same workflow onto a Kubernetes cluster and deploy IOCs with ArgoCD continuous deployment.

If you only need IOCs on a single server you can stop after the workstation track; the cluster track is independent and can be tackled later.

Before you start, it helps to have some background in the technologies the framework builds on:

Topic	Link
An introduction to containers	https://www.docker.com/resources/what-container/
Managing containers with podman	https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/Introduction.html
Introduction to docker compose	https://docs.docker.com/compose/
Orchestrating containers with Kubernetes	https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/
Managing packages with Helm	https://helm.sh/docs/intro/quickstart/
Introduction to EPICS	https://docs.epics-controls.org/en/latest/guides/EPICS_Intro.html
Continuous deployment with Argo CD	https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

For an overview of how epics-containers fits these together, read Essential Concepts.

You will need a workstation running Linux, Mac or Windows, plus a free GitHub account. All the required software is open source. The next tutorial, Set up a Developer Workstation, walks you through installing it.