VT EGI Pay-for-Use PoC

This page is dedicated to the EGI Pay-for-Use Pilot Group and 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 Pilot Group 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.

Objectives

The objectives are the group are to:

1. Gather both resource providers and user communities as active participants.
2. Create a dedicate Pay-for-Use VO and set up required services.
3. Define how resources will be metered and accounted for through the Accounting Portal.
4. Perform a gap analysis of customer, consumer, broker and resource provider 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.
5. Evaluate legal, policy, and organisational issues around the full implementation of the pay-for-use model.
6. Introduce a billing function.
7. Submit a final report covering the overall activities and final output for EGI Management.

Group Members

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
Daniele Cesini, INFN	Steven Newhouse, EGI.EU
Alessandro Costantini, INFN	Alison Packer, 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
Sigve Haug, ETH ZURICH	Onur Temizsoylu, TUBITAK ULAKBIM

Technical Details

NGI / Resource Centre
Albert Einstein Center, Univ. of Bern
France Grilles
<span style="line-height: 19.90625px;" />Leibniz SC Centre
MASTER-UP Srl
NGI-DE
NGI-IT
PL-GRID
SARA
TUBITAK ULAKBIM
UIIP NASB

    

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