Cloud Compute

The EGI Cloud service offers a multi-cloud IaaS federation that brings together research clouds as a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services for research and science.

This documentation focuses on using the service. Those resource providers willing to integrate into the service, please check the EGI Federated Cloud Integration documentation.

Cloud Compute gives you the ability to deploy and scale virtual machines on-demand. It offers computational resources in a secure and isolated environment controlled via APIs without the overhead of managing physical servers.

Cloud Compute service is provided through a federation of IaaS cloud sites that offer:

• Single Sign-On via EGI Check-in, users can login into every provider with their institutional credentials and use modern industry standards like OpenID Connect.
• Global VM image catalogue at AppDB with pre-configured Virtual Machine images that are automatically replicated to every provider based on your community needs.
• Resource discovery features to easily understand which providers are supporting your community and what are their capabilities.
• Global accounting that aggregates and allows visualisation of usage information across the whole federation.
• Monitoring of Availability and Reliability of the providers to ensure SLAs are met.

The flexibility of the Infrastructure as a Service can benefit various use cases and usage models. Besides serving compute/data intensive analysis workflows, Web services and interactive applications can be also integrated with and hosted on this infrastructure. Contextualisation and other deployment features can help application operators fine tune services in the cloud, meeting software (OS and software packages), hardware (number of cores, amount of RAM, etc.) and other types of needs (e.g. orchestration, scalability).

Since the opening of the EGI Federated Cloud, the following usage models have emerged:

• Service hosting: the EGI Federated Cloud can be used to host any IT service as web servers, databases, etc. Cloud features, as elasticity, can help users to provide better performance and reliable services.
  • Example: NBIS Web Services, Peachnote analysis platform.
• Compute and data intensive applications: for those applications needing considerable amount of resources in terms of computation and/or memory and/or intensive I/O. Ad-hoc computing environments can be created in the EGI cloud providers to satisfy extremly intensive HW resource requirements.
  • Example: VERCE platform, The Genetics of Salmonella Infections, The Chipster Platform.
• Datasets repository: the EGI Cloud can be used to store and manage large datasets exploiting the large amount of disk storage available in the Federation.
• Disposable and testing environments: environments for training or testing new developments.
  • Example: Training infrastructure

EGI Federated Cloud task force

The EGI Federated Cloud task force gathers together scientific communities, R&D projects, and technology and resource providers so they can design the tools and services that support the federation of providers, can share best practices, and can offer user support and training in a collaborative fashion. This enables community cloud solutions to develop faster, with a lower cost and with a more sustainable future. The task force members:

• Capture requirements from user communities needing federated cloud services.
• Identify, integrate and enhance open source tools and services that enable cloud federations for research and education.
• Develop and maintain tools and services to fill gaps in third party solutions to reach production quality cloud federations.
• Provide consultancy and training for communities on how to build a federated cloud to meet custom community demands under certain constraints.
• Provide training and support for existing and potential users of cloud federations about topics, such as how to port or develop cloud-native applications; how to operate services in the cloud; or how to join a cloud federation as a provider.
• Facilitate the reuse of cloud federation tools and services across participating cloud federations to lower total cost of development and to improve cloud sustainability.
• Promote Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) environments that are proven to be robust and reusable across communities to interact with federated IaaS.
• Provide service management and security oversight for participating clouds and cloud federations.
• Act as a discussion forum where cloud federations can be discussed and specific questions can be analysed with top-world experts.
• Organise dissemination and marketing events, workshops and conferences relating to the topics of the collaboration.

If you are interested in joining the EGI FedCloud Task Force, please send an email to fedcloud-tf _at_ mailman.egi.eu introducing yourself.

We hold meetings regularly Tuesdays at 11.00 CE(S)T every two weeks. Check our indico category for minutes and upcoming events.