Automotive Container Orchestration: Requirements, Challenges and Open Directions

After having changed the landscape of software development and operations in cloud computing, virtualization technologies such as containers have now become a technology of interest for in-vehicular E/E architectures. Packaging software components and all their dependencies into portable containers is promising to simplify the deployments on modern in-vehicle platforms. A key component to distribute and manage containerized applications within a computing system is the orchestrator. As a logically centralized component, it is responsible to deploy, manage and monitor containerized applications and their health state and migrate them if necessary, e.g., in event of failures. However, the design of the existing orchestration solutions, such as Kubernetes (k8s), is mainly driven by cloud or IoT applications, not addressing the requirements of automotive applications such as heterogeneous communication networks or functional safety. In this paper, we discuss the functions of an automotive grade container orchestrator in an in-vehicular network and elicit its requirements. We explore k3s, a specialized orchestration framework for edge computing, and highlight its shortcomings for usage in automotive networks. Finally, we conclude with a set of open challenges and directions towards the development of an automotive grade container orchestrator.