EGI Virtualisation Activities

Defining a roadmap for a federated virtualised Infrastructure

EGI User Virtualisation Workshop:

This workshop brought together more than 70 Participants from three critical groups (resource providers, end-users and technology providers) within the European production infrastructure to ask the following series of questions:

• Should EGI move towards providing an 'Infrastructure as a Service' model (a.k.a. cloud computing) tuned to support data intensive research communities?
• Should this service be provided by federations of resource providers from the research community, commercially by ad hoc agreements between users and resource providers, or by collective negotiation and purchase of resources on behalf of different communities?
• What sort of use (consuming communities and use cases) would the research community make of such a capability?
• What are the major issues (e.g. technical, policy, governance, etc.) that need to be resolved for this use to happen?

Over a 2-3 day workshop through a series of presentations and breakouts we tried to answer these questions in order to end the meeting with a set of critical observations that could be developed into a roadmap that will meet the growing need for virtualised resources from the European research communities.

Time and place

The workshop was held 12-13 May 2011 in Amsterdam.

Background Material

The meeting schedule deliberately did not spend a lot of time on technology related presentations or provide an introduction for cloud computing. There are plenty of meetings that can provide that information. A selection of recent events are provided below:

• CloudScape III, Brussels, March
• EGI User Forum - Cloud & Virtualisation sessions, Vilnius, Lithuania, April
• SIENA Grids and Clouds standards roadmap
• DCI Collaborative Roadmap

Agenda and Post-event Information

• Workshop webpage
  
• Detailed minutes
  
• Summary Report
  

Discussion Mailing List

If you are interested in contributing to the virtualisation discussion, feel free to use cloud-discuss@mailman.egi.eu.