EGI Pay-for-Use PoC

This page is dedicated to the EGI Pay-for-Use Proof of Concept activities.

Overview

Motivation

Sustainability has been an issue explored by EGI in various ways over the last couple years. There are also messages from the European Commission that keeping the status quo is not an option for e-Infrastructures and EGI should therefore explore options around a more market driven e-Infrastructure for supporting the ERA. However, EGI operates within a publicly funded research and academic environment providing services free at point of delivery with resources bought from grants dedicated to certain groups or disciplines either by direct allocation or by peer review. With the advent of cloud computing, business models and user expectations are shifting towards on-demand and pay-per-use service provision increasing flexibility and agility. This new paradigm provides another motivation for EGI to explore new service definitions by enabling the possibility to provide ICT services that can be paid for the use, along with the more traditional procurement of resources to be managed and offered for free to the owners.

Mandate

This Proof of Concept was set up following an exploratory report approved by the EGI Council for how pay-for-use models for EGI resources could be implemented alongside existing procedures where users are billed for the usage of resources. The mandate of the group is to create a proof of concept pay-for-use prototype.

According to the current plan, this activity will be part of PY5 and there will be possibility to have allocated budget.

Objectives

The objectives are the group are to:

1. Associate prices to participating sites within the GOCDB for the Accounting Portal (both for compute and storage) with appropriate accounting measures.
2. Define required agreements and service management processes and procedures.
3. Investigate and introduce a billing function.
4. Articulate appropriate business and responsibility models.
5. Perform a gap analysis of supporting services (either new or extensions to the current tools) that would enable the increased automation of the process once it has been manually established and subsequent development required for missing functionality.
6. Evaluate legal, policy, and organisational issues around the full implementation of the pay-for-use model.
7. Submit a final report covering the overall activities and final output for EGI Management (and the EC).

Milestones

The milestones and timeline of activities are:

• January 2014: Kick-off of the activity
• April 2014: First phase implementation of all technical specifications, list of required agreements and refinements to policy issues documented in the EGI Sustainability Plan (M48)
• May 2014: Pay-for-Use aspects included in Federated Cloud release (even in Beta/pre-production)
• June 2014: First presentation of activities and feedback from EGI-InSPIRE EC Review
• October 2014: Conclusion of phase 2 activities: updates from feedback and overall refinements
• December 2014: Circulation/Publication of Final Proof of Concept Report

Group Members

The below list are those who expressed interested following the initial exploratory activities.

We are welcoming additional participants from: resource providers, technical developers, non-technical members to support the related policy issues and service management aspects as well as user communities to role play as potential customers.

Sub-groups will be created to focus on specific areas, as needed.

Sergio Andreozzi, EGI.eu	Helmut Heller, BADW
Axel Berg, SARA	Sy Holsinger, EGI.EU
Vincent Breton, CNRS	Antonio Lagana, UNIPG
Wilhelm Buehler, KIT-G	Yannick Legre, CNRS
Tiziana Ferrari, EGI.eu	Daniele Cesini, INFN
Alessandro Costantini, INFN	Stuart Pullinger, STFC
Andrea Cristofori, INFN	Serge Salamanka, UIIP NASB
Feyza Eryol, TUBITAK ULAKBIM	Diego Scardaci, INFN
Tiziana Ferrari, EGI.EU	Mariusz Sterzel, CYFRONET
Luciano Gaido, INFN	Achim Streit, KIT-G
John Gordon, STFC	Onur Temizsoylu, TUBITAK ULAKBIM
Sigve Haug, ETH ZURICH

Technical Details

Technical details to be included

How to Join

If you would like to participate in the Pilot Group, contact policy@egi.eu

References

• EGI Pay-for-Use Exploratory Report for the EGI Council - https://documents.egi.eu/document/1391
• Pay-for-Use Survey Summary - https://documents.egi.eu/document/1391
• Pay-for-Use Presentation at Evolving EGI workshop: http://indico.egi.eu/indico/contributionDisplay.py?sessionId=3&contribId=9&confId=1252
• JRA1 Recommendations in D2.7 Sustainability Plan - https://documents.egi.eu/document/313
• EGI Federated Cloud Task Force - https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Fedcloud-tf:FederatedCloudsTaskForce
• EGI Accounting Portal - http://accounting.egi.eu/egi.php