Difference between revisions of "Federated Cloud user support"

Revision as of 22:54, 14 May 2014

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Users of the EGI Federated Cloud are scientists working in many fields, who can benefit of a flexible environment for running their experiment. Also, the EGI cloud is suitable to projects aiming to provide services platforms to the scientific community.

Concept

The EGI Federated Cloud is a seamless grid of academic private clouds and virtualised resources, built around open standards and focusing on the requirements of the scientific community. The result is a new type of research e-infrastructure, based on the mature federated operations services that make EGI a reliable resource for science. When using EGI Federated Cloud resources, researchers and research communities can count on:

Total control over deployed applications
Elastic resource consumption based on real need
Immediately processed workloads – no more waiting time
An extended e-Infrastructure across resource providers in Europe
Service performance scaled with elastic resource consumption
Single sign-on to cloud resources at multiple, independent sites

After obtaining access to one or more sites of the EGI federated cloud, the prospective user can setup and operate custom services, applications, simulations within the virtualized hosting environments of these sites. To do so the user will needs to:

Create a virtual machine image that encapsulates an operating system, their scientific software and any optional component that is needed for this software to function in a remote and possible distributed environment. (For example a middleware for distributed computing, a framework for remote monitoring, etc.).
- Tip: Images from the EGI Applications Database may be reusable, customisable for your use case.
Instantiate the virtual machine image(s) on the EGI cloud. This is possible through the ‘Open Cloud Computing Interface’ (OCCI) that every EGI cloud site implements, or through high-level tools that are built on top of the OCCI capabilities. Using the OCCI interface guarantees that your work will be compatible with any site that currently exists or will join the EGI Federated Cloud in the future.
- Tip: Follow this guide to setup the rOCCI command line client.
- Tip: Read in this guidance about various options of porting applications to the EGI Federated Cloud.
Operate services based on virtual images in the cloud. The EGI Monitoring system provides a backbone to collect availability information about services, to open and submit trouble tickets to service providers about failed probes, and to generate reliability and availability statistics for service operation.

Current FedCloud Users and Communities

More details of the FedCloud User Communities and their use cases is in the FedCloud Users Communities page.

How to use the FedCloud?

A brief description on how to use the FedCloud resources is described in the text below. More information can be found on the FedCloud FAQ page and the Guides and Tutorials listed in this page. Technical support is available via the EGI.eu UCST Team

Getting access

The typical user workflow on the EGI Federated Cloud looks like:

Obtain a grid certificate from a recognised CA
Join a Virtual Organisation:
1. The fedcloud.egi.eu Virtual Organisation (VO) provides resources for application prototyping and validation. The VO can be used for up to 6 month for any new user.
2. Several other VOs of EGI make resources available from the Federated Cloud. Find a suitable VO in the Operations Portal. (Search for Cloud as a middleware type.)
3. New VOs can be setup in the Operations Portal, and invite sites from the infrastructure to support them.
Prepare Virtual Appliance and make these available for the VO Manager
1. Prepare Virtual Images that encapsulate your application
2. Make the images available online, for example in the Stratuslab Marketplace
3. Register the images as a Virtual Appliance in the EGI Applications Database
4. Inform the VO Manager about the new image, so he can include your images in the VO-wide image list for the Federated Cloud sites
Use the command line client, or some high level environment, for example an Infrastructure broker or an Application Broker to instantiate and manage your Virtual Machine Images on the sites of your Virtual Organisation.

Guides and tutorials

This list provides pointers to manuals and tutorials that may be useful for you to create, optimise, start up and operate Virtual Machine Images on the EGI Federated Cloud:

A bit of technical background

Cloud providers of EGI use hardware virtualization technologies to host scientific software on their resources. The cloud management platform that makes this possible vary from site to site, but they enable resource centers to manage virtualized computing, storage and networking resources and to empower scientific groups to setup and operate their domain specific services, applications and simulations within the virtualized environments.

To deploy a custom application in the cloud one needs to first create a virtual machine (VM) image(s) encapsulating both a operating system and the specific scientific software that implements the domain specific calculation. The image then needs to be instantiated on machines provided by the cloud. Every site of the EGI federated cloud exposes the same programming interfaces for virtual machine setup and data manipulation operations, therefore applications that are built for one site of the EGI Federated Cloud can run at any of the EGI cloud sites. The use of the cloud services are further simplified for scientific groups by a set of reusable, extendable virtual machine images from the EGI VM marketplace, and by technical assistance and support provided by the [email:ucst@egi.eu User Community Support Team] of EGI.eu.

EGI Federated Cloud Sites

The EGI FedCloud sites are the EGI resource providers.

Sites in the EGI Federated Cloud are still operating in a test bed mode, however some of the sites are already available for international research collaborations to use for application demonstrations and pilots. The full list of sites providing resources to the EGI FedCloud testbed is available here

Interfaces and protocols

The EGI Federated Cloud is designed to satisfy scenarios defined by the EGI community in consultation with potential users of pan-European cloud services. The initial set of scenarios that the community collected has been distilled down to capabilities that the EGI Federated Cloud must provide to enable the use cases. These capabilities were compared to state-of-the-art cloud computing technologies, standards, protocols and APIs to identify a technology stack which can help the National Grid Infrastructures and research communities connect resources into a federated cloud. The work has not finished yet, but there are already a few technologies in the stack and operated on sites of the EGI Federated Cloud test bed.

Name of the technology	Description	What it’s used for in EGI?	Technology homepage
OCCI: Open Cloud Computing Interface	The Open Cloud Computing Interface comprises a set of open community-lead specifications delivered through the Open Grid Forum. OCCI is a Protocol and API for all kinds of management tasks. OCCI was originally initiated to create a remote management API for Infrastructure as a Service model based Services, allowing for the development of interoperable tools for common tasks including deployment, autonomic scaling and monitoring. It has since evolved into a flexible API with a strong focus on integration, portability, interoperability and innovation while still offering a high degree of extensibility.	Virtual Machine management	http://occi-wg.org/
GLUE Schema	The GLUE Schema is a common way of publishing information about grid or cloud resources. GLUE is developed by consortium of grid projects, including the two largest projects of the EGI collaboration: EGI-InSPIRE and EMI. GLUE describes attributes of sites and services, computing elements and storage elements. Implementations of the Schema exist for a range of systems, the EGI Federated Cloud uses the LDAP based BDII implementation.	Information system for cloud resources	http://www.ggf.org/gf/group_info/view.php?group=glue</span>
X509	User authentication is a means of identifying the user and verifying that the user is allowed to access some restricted service, particularly the sites of the EGI Federated Cloud. Public-key cryptography is a cryptographic technique that enables users to securely communicate on an insecure public network, and reliably verify the identity of a user via digital signatures. The X.509 specification defines a standard for managing digital signatures on the Internet. X.509 specifies, amongst other things, standard formats for public key certificates, certificate revocation lists, attribute certificates, and a certification path validation algorithm.	User authentication	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.509

User support

Technical support

Users' technical support is provided via the EGI.eu UCST Team email.

Helpdesk

Technical problems and questions relating to the use of the EGI Federated Cloud can be reported and dealt with through the EGI Helpdesk ticketing system. Note: Please choose 'Federated cloud' in the 'Type of problem' field of the ticket submission form!

Feedback and open issues

A list of open-issue and feedbacks reported by the FedCloud users is available at this page.

@@ Line 58: / Line 58: @@
 ## Several other VOs of EGI make resources available from the Federated Cloud. Find a suitable VO in the [http://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/search Operations Portal]. (Search for Cloud as a middleware type.)
 ## New VOs can be [http://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/registrationWelcome setup in the Operations Portal], and invite sites from the infrastructure to support them.
-# Prepare virtual machine images and register these in the EGI Applications Database
+# Prepare Virtual Appliance and make these available for the VO Manager
-## The user can register a new 'Virtual Appliance' in the Applications Database, then associates the VM images with it. By default these will be publicly accessible. Instruction to make the Virtual Appliance private [at https://wiki.appdb.egi.eu/main:guides:general:privacy_guide are available]. (Note: You do not have to be a VO Member to upload VAs and VMIs into the Applications Database.)
+## Prepare Virtual Images that encapsulate your application
-# Use the [[Fedcloud-tf:CLI_EnvironmentrOCCI | command line client]], or some high level environment, for example an [[Fedcloud-tf:Users:ApplicationPortingHowTo#4._Infrastructure_broker | Infrastructure broker]] or an [[Fedcloud-tf:Users:ApplicationPortingHowTo#5._Application_broker | Application Broker]] to manage your Virtual Machine Images on the Federated Cloud.
+## Make the images available online, for example in the [http://marketplace.egi.eu/metadata Stratuslab Marketplace]
+## Register the images as a Virtual Appliance in the [http://appdb.egi.eu EGI Applications Database]
+## Inform the VO Manager about the new image, so he can include your images in the VO-wide image list for the Federated Cloud sites
+# Use the [[Fedcloud-tf:CLI_EnvironmentrOCCI | command line client]], or some high level environment, for example an [[Fedcloud-tf:Users:ApplicationPortingHowTo#4._Infrastructure_broker | Infrastructure broker]] or an [[Fedcloud-tf:Users:ApplicationPortingHowTo#5._Application_broker | Application Broker]] to instantiate and manage your Virtual Machine Images on the sites of your Virtual Organisation.
 === Guides and tutorials  ===