Joining as a Technology Provider

Introduction

Technology Providers (TP) develop or deliver technology and software for specific user communities or customisation for specific requirements. In EGI case, they maintain the middleware which the RCs install and allowing the users to exploit the compute, storage, data, and cloud resources.

Integration of middleware stack

To maintain an appropriate quality of service of the EGI production infrastructure, every middleware stack (Compute, Storage, etc.) installed on and delivered by the RCs must fulfil a number of requirements.

PROC19 was defined to ensure that any single aspect of the integration of the new piece of middleware with the infrastructure is reviewed and assessed.

After the creation of the request in the EGI Helpdesk, with details about the technology, the contacts, the expected customers, and the motivation, the integration steps cover the following areas (where possible, steps can be done in parallel):

• Underpinning Agreement (UA) between EGI Foundation and the technology provider
  • it could be either the Corporate-level Technology Provider Underpinning Agreement or a customised version.
• Configuration Management: mapping of the new technology in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
• Information System: evaluating if the new technology should publish information in the Information System according to the GLUE Schema.
• Monitoring: the new technology should allow external monitoring. If particular aspects of the technology need to be monitored, specific monitoring probes should be provided by the TPs and deployed on the EGI Monitoring service.
• Support: the Support Unit where incidents and service requests will be addressed needs to be defined in the EGI Helpdesk, associated to the Quality of Support defined in the UA.
• Accounting: the need to gather usage data, which depends on the technology itself and on the infrastructure requirements and will be published in the EGI Accounting Portal.
• Integration in UMD or CMD: the Unified Middleware Distribution (UMD) and Cloud Middleware Distribution (CMD) are the integrated sets of software components contributed by Technology Providers and packaged for deployment as production quality services in EGI.
• Documentation: exhaustive documentation for RC administrators and users should be provided and may be added to the EGI Documentation.
• Security: a security assessment of the software is required according to a number of guidelines defined by the EGI Security team.