Containerisation > BNCS Communication

There are several options available for communicating between a DDK based driver and the rest of the BNCS network. The DDK contains a native implementation of the BNCS XDS protocol that can directly interact with the network and also implements a websocket connection to a CSI gateway - either legacy BNCS-CSI running under Windows (a supported but not recommended option) or the new CSI container.

It is recommended that driver developers expose all the appropriate configuration options so that the decision on which connectivity mechanism to use can be made at the point of deployment. EmbeddedCSI is simpler but each driver container will require a dedicated workstation id which may prove problematic and wasteful on larger systems. Using the WebSocket option reduces workstation id consumption as only the gateways require one but at the expense of some deployment complexity.