Cloud Compute
EGI Cloud Compute (FedCloud)
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Authentication and Authorisation on EGI Cloud
Managing VM images in the EGI Cloud
The VMOPs Dashboard for management of VMs on the federation
How to interact with the OpenStack providers APIs in the EGI Cloud
Storage features of the EGI Cloud
GPU resources on EGI Cloud
Dynamic DNS for VMs in EGI Cloud
Using the Elastic Cloud Compute Cluster on EGI Cloud
The EGI Cloud architecture and technical implementation details
Frequenlty Asked Questions
Last modified February 10, 2021:
Update _index.md (#180) (36fca1f)