ViCE Registry: An Image Registry for Virtual Collaborative Environments

The paper presents a concept and an implementation for an image registry for virtual collaborative environments (ViCE). This cross-platform and cross-organizational image registry bridges gaps between execution environment platforms and user communities. The presented concept consists of a conceptual architecture and a sophisticated set of metadata fields to describe images as virtual environments. The main challenge is the wide spread definition of an image. The terminology defines execution environments, which consist of runtime technologies (virtual machines, containers, applications) and a management layer (basic management, cloud computing, container clusters, job schedulers). An execution environment runs a deployable implicit or declarative image to build a virtual environment. With this abstraction the image registry can share virtual environment across Cloud computing, HPC, classroom setups, with any of KVM, Docker, Singularity, etc. in use. The open source implementation is written in Go and presented with a scalable microservice architecture, using Couchbase as metadata store and RabbitMQ as communication hub between software components.