A functional Test-bed requires many services, and installing them physically on a machine would require a substantial amount of time, and is error prone. Additionally, not every Trial or exercise requires the same setup, and therefore the Test-bed uses the virtualisation services provided by the open Docker platform.
To execute a successful Trial, you just need to combine the services that you need in a simple text file, often called docker-compose.yml, after which you can start all Test-bed services with a single command.
# For starting all services:
> docker-compose up -d
# Or to stop it and clean up everything, run:
> docker-compose down
# It removes everything so you can start with a clean slate,
# except for the recorded messages, which use a so-called 'volume.
A minimal example is given below, but actually used versions during the Trials can be found at the Test-bed website at https://github.io/DRIVER-EU/test-bed. In the example, besides Apache Kafka for sharing information, and Apache Zookeeper for keeping track of client sessions, you see the schema registry for registering all used schemas, a time service, and the Trial Management Tool. The large file service is commented out (not needed at the moment). Typical Test-beds are more extensive, and contain additional tools such as the admin tool, AAR, OST, schema registry UI, and several more.