The H2020 OCRE Project Opens the Gates of the Commercial Cloud and EO Services Usage to the Research Community

Cloud and Earth Observation (EO) based services offer the European Research community a wealth of powerful tools. However, for many researchers these tools are currently out of reach. It is difficult to find and select suitable services. Establishing agreements with cloud and EO service providers and ensuring legal and technical compliance requires specialist skills and takes an inordinate amount of time. Equally, service providers find it difficult to reach and meet the needs of the research community in technical, financial and legal areas. The Open Clouds for Research Environments consortium (OCRE) will change this, by putting in place an easy adoption route. In the autumn of 2019, OCRE will run a pan-European tender and establish framework agreements with service providers who meet the requirements of the research community. 10.000 European research and education institutes will be able to directly consume these offerings via the European Open Science Cloud service catalogue, through ready-to-use agreements. They will not have to run a tender of their own. In addition, to stimulate usage, OCRE will make available 9.5 million euro in service credits (vouchers), through adoption funds from the European Commission. OCRE is a pioneer project without precedence, with potentially high impact in the future EO market activities and evolution of service offering, with the objective to burst the usage of EO commercial services by the research environment

SlipStream: automated provisioning and continuous deployment in the cloud

Cloud technology is now everywhere. Beyond the hype, it provides a real opportunity to improve the engineering of software systems. Lately the DevOps movement has also gain momentum, which take an agile approach at bringing developers and system administrators closer together to better engineer software systems. In this context, this presentation focuses on new tools for exploiting cloud services (private and public) in order to create a continuous flow between software commits and fully deployed and configured software systems, automatically and on-demand. To illustrate this, we present SlipStream and StratusLab. SlipStream is a new product developed by SixSq, able to create virtual machines and orchestrate multi-machine deployments. &nbsp;SlipStream started from an idea developed in the context of the ETICS project, led by CERN. StratusLab is an open-source IaaS distribution, able to create public and private clouds. This presentation will&nbsp;also describe a case study where SlipStream deploys an entire Mission Control System for the Operations Center of the European Space Agency. &nbsp;We also describe how SlipStream can be integrated with management tools, such as Puppet and Chef. About the speaker Marc-Elian B&eacute;gin is co-founder of SixSq. At SixSq he is the lead developer of the SlipStream product, leads the Integration and Test Work Package of the StratusLab FP7 project, delivers regular agile training and is coach for different customers, including the Operation Centre of ESA (ESOC). He worked at CERN from 2004 to 2008 in the IT Department, as developer and technical lead on the EGEE and ETICS projects. Before joining CERN, he worked for a decade in the space industry, contributing to the delivery of several software systems, both for the space agencies and industry in Canada and Europe. Marc-Elian is a regular speaker at international events, such as Agile2011, XP2011 and DevOpsDays. In Helix Nebula, he leads the Architecture and Technical Group, responsible for short and longer term technical solutions for the cloud collaboration.</p

ETICS User feedback and Usability Workshop

As ETICS is gaining momentum, its user community is growing. We now have over 15 projects (mainly Grid related) from different grid user communities; for example: gLite developers and integrators, high-level services developers (e.g. GridWay and DILIGENT). This workshop will provide an opportunity for exchange between the growing ETICS user community and ETICS developers. ETICS is powered by Grid middleware, via the NMI/Condor that ‘We're using the Grid to build the Grid’. This is why ETICS can claim The Grid allows ETICS users to transparently build and test complex software on a wide range of architecture, operating system and environments, in turn accelerating the ability for software to properly execute in heterogeneous environment like Grids. We are not yet able to run on the EGEE infrastructure, since we're missing an important element: virtualisation. As soon as we are able to ship with a build and test job a VM of the environment required for the job, we'll be able to exploit the full power of the EGEE infrastructure. This is work in progress and an important focus for ETICS work plan for 2007. As mentioned above, virtualisation is an important enabler for ETICS's usage of a public Grid such as EGEE. Software built and tested with ETICS requires a highly controlled environment in order to ensure build and test reproducibility over time. This is why virtualisation is key for ETICS, such that it provides the required controlled environment no matter what the state of the host computer is in, as long as it can execute the VM