Software provider - How to deploy your application

There are multiple ways to deploy an application on SEAPATH, depending on the features needed

• Virtual machines are the primary target for SEAPATH. They allow a high isolation, enhancing multi-provider applications. VMs benefit from high-availability when in a cluster.

• Containers can also be deployed on SEAPATH. They are faster and lighter than virtual machines but offer less isolation. High availability is not yet implemented for containers on SEAPATH.

Use virtual machines

SEAPATH uses QEMU and Libvirt to deploy virtual machines. With this technology, two elements are needed:

• A Libvirt XML configuration file: This file describes all the devices needed by the VM. It can be memory, CPU information, interfaces ...

• A VM disk image: This file represents the disk of the virtual machine; it will contain the kernel as well as the filesystem.
  VM disks come in different formats. On SEAPATH, qcow2 is used.

The handling of the Libvirt XML file and the actual VM deployment is explained in the next section Deploying virtual machines. This page only tackles the disk question

There are three cases to consider if you want to deploy your application in a VM

• You already have your own VM

• You only have your application and want to run it inside a VM

• You want to use a third-party VM

Use your own VM

If you already have a VM disk, or if you want to use a specific operating system (Ubuntu, Windows …), you must convert the disk to qcow2 format.

It is possible to convert alternative disk image formats to qcow2 thanks to qemu-img. Refer to qemu documentation.

Use a generic SEAPATH VM

If you only have your application and need a virtual machine to run it, you can use a generic SEAPATH VM which contains:

• All applicable cybersecurity policies and tests applied on SEAPATH hypervisor

• Minimal applications installed

Information on how to build a disk image in detail is available here for a Yocto-based VM, or here for a Debian-based VM.

Use a supported provider VM

Some provider VMs are supported in SEAPATH, you can deploy them following their documentation: Third party virtual machines

Use containers on SEAPATH

SEAPATH supports the launch of containers using Docker. For now, containers are only launched on a single machine and cannot benefit from the high-availability cluster