Software Provisioning Inside a Secure Environment as Docker Containers Using Stroll File-System

TSD (Tjenester for Sensitive Data), is an isolated infrastructure for storing and processing sensitive research data, e.g. human patient genomics data. Due to the isolation of the TSD, it is not possible to install software in the traditional fashion. Docker containers is a platform implementing lightweight virtualization technology for applying the build-once-run-anyware approach in software packaging and sharing. This paper describes our experience at USIT (The University Centre of Information Technology) at the University of Oslo With Docker containers as a solution for installing and running software packages that require downloading of dependencies and binaries during the installation, inside a secure isolated infrastructure. Using Docker containers made it possible to package software packages as Docker images and run them smoothly inside our secure system, TSD. The paper describes Docker as a technology, its benefits and weaknesses in terms of security, demonstrates our experience with a use case for installing and running the Galaxy bioinformatics portal as a Docker container inside the TSD, and investigates the use of Stroll file-system as a proxy between Galaxy portal and the HPC cluster.