EGI-InSPIRE:SA1 EGI Global tasks assessments

Notes to contributors

Assessment: (Provide an assessment of the delivery of services over the past year from a managerial perspective; highlight positive areas and areas for improvement; do not include future plans; text should be roughly 1-2 paragraphs)

Score: (assign a numerical score from 1 to 5 with a succinct explanation of what needs to be improved to increase your score – remove numerical description references upon completion) 1 = An unacceptable level of service was delivered

2 = A level of service that was below expectations was delivered

3 = An acceptable service level has been delivered

4 = A level of service that exceeded expectations was delivered, but there is scope for even further improvement

5 = An excellent service has been delivered that should be considered as best practice

EGI Global Tasks

Human Services

Operation Management Board

The Operations Management Board (OMB) drives future developments in the operations area by making sure that the infrastructure operations evolve to support the integration of new resources such as desktop grids, cloud computing and virtualisation, and high performance computing resources. It does this by providing management and developing policies and procedures for the operational services that are integrated into the production infrastructure through a set of distributed management and product teams.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Operations Management Board

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Operations Management Board	write here	write here	write here

Operations Support

EGI.eu coordinates and supervises operations and network support activities provided by the individual NGIs to ensure that operational issues are properly handled at both Resource Centre and NGI level. It is also responsible of handling of Resource Centre suspension in case of operational issues.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Operations Support

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Operations Support	write here	write here	write here

Security

Description: Security vulnerabilities and risks presented by e-Infrastructures provide a rationale for coordination amongst the EGI participants at various levels. Central coordination groups ensure policies, operational security, and maintenance to guarantee secure access to users. In addition, security and incident response is provided through the EGI Computer Security and Incident Response Team by coordinating activity at the sites across the infrastructure. This coordination ensures that common policies are followed by providing services such as security monitoring, training and dissemination with the goal of improving the response to incidents (e.g. security drills).

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Security

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Security	write here	write here	write here

Infrastructure Services

Software Rollout

Updates of deployed software need to be gradually adopted in production after internal verification. This process is implemented in EGI through staged rollout, i.e. through the early deployment of a new component by a selected list of candidate Resource Centres. The successful verification of a new component is a precondition for declaring the software ready for deployment. Given the scale of the EGI infrastructure, this process requires careful coordination to ensure that every new capability is verified by a representative pool of candidate sites, to supervise the responsiveness of the candidate sites and ensure that the staged rollout progresses well without introducing unnecessary delays, and to review the reports produced. It also ensures the planning of resources according to the foreseen release schedules from the Technology Providers. EGI.eu coordination is necessary to ensure a successful interoperation of the various stakeholders: Resource Centres, Technology Providers, the EGI.eu Technical Manager and the EGI repository managers.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Software Rollout

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Software Rollout	write here	write here	write here

Monitoring

Description: A distributed monitoring framework is necessary to continuously test the level of functionality delivered by each service node instance in the production Resource Centres, to generate alarms and tickets in case of critical failures and to compute monthly availability and reliability statistics, and to monitor and troubleshoot network problems. The Monitoring Infrastructure is a distributed service based on Nagios and messaging. The central services – operated by EGI.eu – include systems such as the MyEGI portal for the visualisation of information, and a set of databases for the persistent storage of information about test results, availability statistics, monitoring profiles and aggregated topology information. The central services need to interact with the local monitoring infrastructures operated by the NGIs. The central monitoring services are critical and need to deliver high availability.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Monitoring

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Monitoring	write here	write here	write here

Accounting

The EGI Accounting Infrastructure is distributed. At a central level it includes the repositories for the persistent storage of usage records, and a portal for the visualisation of accounting information. The central databases are populated through individual usage records published by the Resource Centres, or through the publication of summarised usage records. The Accounting Infrastructure is essential in a service-oriented business model to record usage information. Accounting data needs to be validated and regularly published centrally.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Accounting

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Accounting	write here	write here	write here

Security

A Security Infrastructure is needed to monitor the status of the individual Resource Centres in case of security vulnerabilities. The monitoring infrastructure – currently based on Nagios and Pakiti - is dedicated. A central security dashboard is also needed to allow sites, NGIs and EGI Computer Security Incident Response Teams to access security alerts in a controlled manner. In addition, a ticketing system is needed to support security incident coordination.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Security

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Security	write here	write here	write here

Configuration Repository

EGI relies on a central database (GOCDB) to record static information about different entities such as the Operations Centres, the Resource Centres, and the service instances. It also provides contact, role and status information. GOCDB is a source of information for many other operational tools, such as the broadcast tool, the Aggregated Topology Provider, etc.

Table 4: EGI Global task assessment:Configuration repository

#	Name	Assessment	Score	How to Improve
#	Configuration repository	write here	write here	write here