Kubernetes (K8s) is one of the most frequently used container orchestration tools offering, as it offers a rich set of functions to manage containerized applications, it is customizable and extensible. Container virtualization of applications and their orchestration on heterogeneous resources including edge devices is a recent trend in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)/Industry 4.0, where K8s is also applied. However, IIoT/Industry 4.0 is a domain with high standardization requirements. Besides equipment standards, e.g., for electrical control cabinets, there are also demands to standardize network protocols, data formats or information models. Such standards can foster interoperability and reduce complexity or deployment/integration costs. Here, the proprietary communication protocol of K8s and similar orchestrators can be an obstacle for adoption.
To explore this situation from an interoperability and integration perspective, we present in this paper an approach to replace the communication protocol of K8s without modifying its code base. We show by an experiment that applying our approach with three current forms of IIoT communication, namely Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and Asset Administration Shell (AAS), does not significantly affect the validity and the performance of K8s.