Modern science gateways face distributed systems engineering challenges from multiple fronts. In this extended abstract, we introduce Abaco (Actor Based Containers), a framework and hosted service based on Linux containers and the actor model of concurrent computing for tackling problems related to portability, scalability, reproducibility, and the heterogeneity of physical infrastructure powering science gateways. We describe the initial implementation of Abaco, its use in the Agave science-as-a-service platform, as well as some related projects and areas of future work
