Tutorials Introduction

Welcome to the epics-containers tutorial series.

These tutorials will introduce you to building, deploying and managing containerized EPICS IOCs. They are intended to be self contained and should be possible to work through without any prior knowledge.

However, to get the most out of the tutorials it would be best to start with some background in the following topics.

An introduction to containers	https://www.docker.com/resources/what-container/
Managing containers on a workstation: introduction to docker	https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/
Introduction to docker compose	https://docs.docker.com/compose/
Podman, a recommended docker alternative	https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/Introduction.html
Orchestrating containers in a cluster with Kubernetes	https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/
Managing packages in a Kubernetes Cluster with Helm	https://helm.sh/docs/intro/quickstart/
Introduction to EPICS	https://docs.epics-controls.org/en/latest/guides/EPICS_Intro.html
Argo CD continuous deployment for Kubernetes	https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

With the above background in hand you should then read the overview of epics-containers architecture here: Essential Concepts

To work through the tutorials you will need a workstation which can be Linux, Mac or Windows. All the software required is open source and available for download. You will also need to have a GitHub account which you can create for free.