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EGI Core activities:2015-bidding Application and appliances database

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Go back to the EGI Core Activities Bidding page.

  • Service name: Appliances and software database (AppDB)


Introduction

The EGI Applications Database (AppDB) is a central service that provides:

  • Information about software solutions in the form of native software products and virtual appliances, linking the programmers and the scientists who are involved, and the publications derived from the registered solutions
  • The tools for the distribution of the virtual machine images in the cloud sites part of the the federated cloud

Three types of software solutions are offered through the EGI Applications Database:

  • Software items, in its classical sense, i.e. applications, tools, utilities, etc..,
  • Virtual Appliances: composed by one or more pre-configured virtual machine images packaged with an operating system and software application(s)
  • Software Appliances: one or more a set pairs of a virtual appliance and a contextualization script. A Contextualization Script (CS) is the script launched on VM boot time and could be used for installing, configuring and preparing software upon boot time on a pre-defined virtual machine image

Technical description

The service is composed by the following components:

  • Software marketplace: a registry to manage software items as applications, tools, utilities, etc. The software marketplace supports the following categories: Application, Tool, Science gateway, Workflow, Middleware product.
  • Cloud marketplace: bundles a set of features that are part of the EGI Collaboration platform as:
    • Virtual and software appliances catalogue: open library of virtual appliances (bundle of one or more VM images) for use on a cloud or for personal download, supporting VM image management operations like: registration of new instances, reuse of existing ones and contextualization.
    • VO-wide image list management: a mechanism that allows to link a list of virtual and software appliances to a VO, which can be automatically and securely distributed to any resource provider supporting the VO.
    • Sites / Resources providers view: list of cloud RPs with information on endpoints, supported VOs, available VM images, flavours and etc.
    • Integration with the EGI Information System: information retrieved by the IS are used to enrich VA, SA and RP views with information useful to interact with the infrastructures.
  • People registry: list of people involved in EGI with links to items registered on the AppDB.
  • Database of VMI queried by the vmcatcher clients at site level, used to store the information about the VMI endorsed by the Federated cloud communities.
  • Software items: registry of software items in terms of applications, middleware products, science gateways and tools, with capability of generating and maintaining associative binary repositories.
  • Registry for reference datasets: the service offers capabilities in order to expose information about reference datasets (mainly on biology domain) and their replicas, across EGI.

Coordination

The service providers must coordinate with the EGI Federated cloud working group, the EGI security for the requirements on VM endorsement and the VO Managers to support the distribution of VMIs through AppDB.

Support

Support is provided through a dedicated support unit in the EGI Helpdesk.

Operations

The activity includes the daily operations of the following user facing services:

  • AppDB Portal
    • Rest API
    • VMCaster
    • Community Repository
    • Gadgets
  • Deployment in production of the developments released in EGI-Engage
  • Maintenance of the services

Service targets

Minimum availability/reliability: 95%/95% Response to incident records in GGUS within support hours: Medium (see https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/FAQ_GGUS-PT-QoS-Levels#Medium_service)

Effort

Bids planning a total effort between 6 and 8 Person Months/year would allow these services and activities to be addressed appropriately.