Tapis Pods Service Exploration and Initial Performance Analysis

The Tapis Pods service is a novel open-source API within the Tapis platform which enables researchers to seamlessly manage Kubernetes containers, volumes, networking, and security at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). This paper explores the underlying operations, technologies, and workflows of the Tapis Pods service, showcasing its implementation and effectiveness. Additionally, we discuss current and potential use cases, highlighting the service's unique features, such as management capabilities, persistent storage, sharing, and automatically encrypted networking. Initial performance measurements against local Docker containers and alternative cloud solutions demonstrate the Tapis Pods service's competitive performance, emphasizing its value as a general interface for deploying user-defined containers.