An Architectural Overview of Karabo SCADA System

Karabo is a pluggable, distributed application management system forming a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) environment as part of a distributed control system. Developed at the European XFEL since 2010 and released as open source in 2023, Karabo provides integrated control of hardware, monitoring, and data acquisition across the XFEL facility, while also facilitating online and pipelined data analysis on distributed hardware.

This talk provides an overview of the basic principles and scalable architecture of Karabo and its major components, including the GUI/CLI clients, Message Broker, Device Controls, and DAQ (Data Acquisition) subsystems. The talk will also discuss the distributed and modular design approach adopted in Karabo, along with a brief comparison of its architecture with other control systems such as Tango Controls and EPICS.