Federated Cloud Compute

The EGI Federated Cloud Compute (FedCloud) 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 see 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 log 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 extremely 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

Eager to test this service? Have a look at how to create your first Virtual Machine in EGI.