The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

After about 15 years of operations, much of the software and hardware of the LOFAR radio telescope is upgraded to deliver LOFAR 2.0. Part of this upgrade is a renewed software architecture.

LOFAR 1 consisted mostly of in-house software products and protocols for its functionality, information exchange, and service management. These codes ran on open source OSes and libraries.

LOFAR 2 instead leverages open-source third-party products as the basis of its architecture. We connect open-source tooling such as Nomad, Consul, Docker, Prometheus, Grafana, MinIO, Tango Controls to provide a powerful base infrastructure and service management system for our telescope management and information flows. These tools provide us with high-level functionality out of the box, often a natural integration between them, and a powerful basis for flexible development.

In this talk we present an overview of this architecture, and some of the lessons from transitioning to it. What we learned when taking other departments along in the transition. How it affected the work flows of operations and ICT, and the requirements for the hardware engineers. Both were handed a fundamentally different set of tools to work with. And about the effects on the design and security aspects of the underlying IT infrastructure, as software abstraction layers make that process more opaque.