Devops

Web developers containerize to isolate processes. Roboticists containerize and then spend the rest of the day punching holes back through the isolation — for the camera, the GPU, the display server and the network. ROS 2 Jazzy is hard-locked to Ubuntu 24.04. That single fact is reason enough to containerize: without it, adopting a ROS distribution means adopting an operating system version, on every machine that will ever run the code. But a ROS container is a strange artifact. A web service container wants isolation — that is the product. A robotics container needs a webcam, a GPU, a display server and multicast networking, all of which live outside it. You end up building a box and then carefully cutting four holes in it. Here is every hole in this project’s compose file and what it is for. Cold start to live tracking. Note hand_msgs being compiled separately inside two different containers — that duplication is deliberate and load-bearing. flowchart TB subgraph HOST["🖥️ Host — Ubuntu / Kubuntu"] X11["X11 socket /tmp/.X11-unix"] CAM["/dev/video0"] GPU["/dev/dri"] NET["host network UDP multicast"] end subgraph C["Active containers · ROS_DOMAIN_ID=42"] HT["hand_tracker"] RV["ros_rviz"] TS["topic_sniffer"] end GZ["gazebo_sim (commented out)"]:::parked classDef parked stroke-dasharray: 5 5,opacity:0.55 CAM --> HT GPU --> HT GPU --> RV X11 --> HT X11 --> RV NET <--> HT NET <--> RV NET <--> TS Hole 1 — the network wall has to come down # network_mode: "host" ipc: host pid: host This is the one that breaks stacks silently, so it is worth understanding rather than copying.