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Federated Cloud user support

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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:

  1. 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.).
  2. 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.
  3. 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

Fedclouduclogos.png


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:

  1. Obtain a grid certificate from a recognised CA
  2. 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.
  3. Prepare Virtual Appliances and deploy these to the sites:
    1. Prepare Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) that encapsulate your application. See the application porting tutorial below for tips.
    2. Make the VMIs available online, for example in the Stratuslab Marketplace
    3. Register the VMIs as Virtual Appliance in the EGI Applications Database
    4. Inform the Manager of your VO through Applications Database about the new Virtual Appliance. He/she will include your images in the VO-wide image list, so these will be deployed on the Federated Cloud sites of your VO.
  4. 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 cloud resources.

Guides and tutorials

These guides and tutorials help you implement the above described typical user workflow and describe alternative ways of access, using high level appliaction broker and infrastructure broker solutions:


Technical background

Cloud providers in the EGI Federated Cloud use hardware virtualization technologies to host software on their resources. The cloud management platforms that make this possible can vary from site to site, but they all enable the provisioning of virtualized computing, storage and networking resources, thus they empower scientific groups to setup and operate domain specific services, applications and simulations on these resources.

To deploy a custom application in the cloud one needs to first create one or more virtual machine (VM) image(s) encapsulating both a operating system and the specific scientific software that implements the domain specific calculation. The images then need to be instantiated on machines of the Federated Cloud. Every site of the EGI federated cloud exposes the same programming interfaces towards the user to setup virtual machines, therefore applications that are built for one site of the EGI Federated Cloud can run at any of the EGI Federated 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 Applications Database, and by technical assistance and support provided by the [email:ucst@egi.eu User Community Support Team] of EGI.eu and the EGI Distributed Competence Centre.

EGI Federated Cloud Sites

The EGI Federated Cloud sites are the resource providers. An overview of the resource providers, and their certification status (production status) is available here
.

Interfaces and protocols

The EGI Federated Cloud is designed to satisfy scenarios defined by various scientific communities who expressed interest in using the system. The initial set of scenarios that the community collected has been distilled down to capabilities that the EGI Federated Cloud must provide to enable these community use cases. The 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 Initiatives and research communities connect resources into a federated cloud. The Federated Cloud currently integrates the following main standard-based technological components:

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.