The impact of cloud computing on science, scientific development and education is undoubtedly increasing. Researchers and research institutes, projects, and communities turn to clouds more and more often when they need a platform to store, share, process or archive large research data in a reliable and user-friendly way. In many cases, these cloud services need to be composed with data and added value thematic services provided by publicly funded research organizations located in different countries. This creates an increasing need for interoperability of composite services provided in a hybrid cloud environment allowing scalable and trusted access to federated research data, and operating in compliance with EU regulations. In order to tackle these challenges, approaches to federate cloud providers need to be devised to suite the different needs of researcher groups.
A cloud federation is an interconnected cloud environment between two or more service providers, offering distributed capacities and capabilities that go beyond the capacity or all types of services that a single cloud can provide. The EGI Federated Cloud is a multi-national cloud system that can integrate institutional and public clouds into a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services. The EGI Federated Cloud collaboration offers scientific communities, R&D projects, technology providers and resource providers a variety of benefits such as:
- Building customised cloud federations for research with the tools and technologies offered by the EGI Federated Cloud.
- Offering technological solutions (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) that can be used in various federated clouds.
- Acting as an advisor towards scientific communities for building federated clouds.
- Serving as a trainer and consultant of users who want to use federated clouds offered by members of the collaboration.
- Consulting on service management and/or security aspects for clouds and cloud federations and contribute to the work of the security and operational oversight group.
- Promoting community-specific, but reusable federation solutions and approaches to other communities within and beyond the EGI collaboration.
A cloud federation is an interconnected cloud environment between two or more service providers, offering distributed capacities and capabilities that go beyond the capacity or all types of services that a single cloud can provide. The EGI Federated Cloud is a multi-national cloud system that can integrate institutional and public clouds into a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services. The EGI Federated Cloud collaboration offers scientific communities, R&D projects, technology providers and resource providers a variety of benefits such as:
- Building customised cloud federations for research with the tools and technologies offered by the EGI Federated Cloud.
- Offering technological solutions (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) that can be used in various federated clouds.
- Acting as an advisor towards scientific communities for building federated clouds.
- Serving as a trainer and consultant of users who want to use federated clouds offered by members of the collaboration.
- Consulting on service management and/or security aspects for clouds and cloud federations and contribute to the work of the security and operational oversight group.
- Promoting community-specific, but reusable federation solutions and approaches to other communities within and beyond the EGI collaboration.
EGI currently operates two realms: the Open Standards Realm and the OpenStack Realm. Both are completely integrated with the EGI federation services but they expose different interfaces to offer IaaS capabilities to the users. The Open Standards Realm uses OCCI standard (supported by providers with OpenNebula, OpenStack and Synnefo cloud management frameworks), while the OpenStack Realm uses the OpenStack native Nova API (support limited to OpenStack providers).
With its long-running experience in federating IT services for international research communities, EGI is interested in advancing its federation architecture by engaging with publicly funded and commercial cloud providers to realize a European research cloud capable of addressing the needs of international research collaborations.