Remote Practical Work Environment based on Containers to replace Virtual Machines
Lamine Yade, Amadou Dahirou Gueye · 2022 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) · 2022
In this paper, we are interested in solutions to improve remote practical work in the field of computing, more specifically in programming, networks and telecommunications. In the literature, practical work solutions, based on the cloud or on synchronous / asynchronous monitoring and collaboration tools or on shared writing spaces, are proposed to enable practical work to be carried out remotely. However, the cloud based solution, which uses virtual machines, consumes a lot of resources, and therefore brings cumbersome. Each virtual machine contains an image of the operating system, libraries, and applications and can therefore grow very large. The solution based on collaboration tools does not integrate IT development environments, and therefore the programmer resorts to screen shares or basic editors which waste a lot of time when it comes to find certain modules, classes or native functions of the language.In this paper, we propose to replace virtual machines with containers to optimize resources, and provide a collaborative and easy-to-access lab interface. Each user connects to their own workspace provided by the container, which is accessible by the teacher and other learners in the same group. The practical work will be carried out from a web interface connected to the virtual environment via an API. Real-time communication between learners and teachers will be ensured by WebRTC technology.