Radio astronomy has a long and rich computing related history, and with that comes a big pile of poorly written, fragile, and badly maintained legacy code. This problem is not unique to radio astronomy but is a common in various scientific fields. Although no quick solution exists when it comes to re-writing lots of legacy code, Docker helps to contain this fragile software, simplifies the installation and ensures that the software works. In this talk I will talk about RODRIGUES, an online radio telescope simulator leverage Docker, Django and related technologies. RODRIGUES itself is heavily based on the composition of containers, and can schedule parameterised scientific compute jobs contained by Docker.

https://github.com/ska-sa/rodrigues