WP4 – Cloud Platform & Provisioning

WP4 – Cloud Platform & Provisioning Technical Review Period 1 This document produced by Members of the Helix Nebula consortium is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://helix-nebula.eu/. The Helix Nebula project is co-funded by the European Community Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement no 312301

WP4 Objectives • Assemble the resources needed to meet the requirements provided by WP3, plus the tools necessary to configure, deploy, monitor and evaluate the flagship. Specific goals • To produce, validate and make available a method of determining and describing a suitable service offering to meet user requirements for the Science Cloud. • To produce, validate and make available a method of matching services to requirements in any specific case. • To deploy that method in the three flagships, based on the specific requirement statements for each flagship (from WP3), in order to allow evaluation (by WP9) of the approach. - 2 -

Effort Contribution • Lead Beneficiary: Atos WP4 – 1pm WP4 – 10.48 pm Extension of WP4 into P2 requested to deliver D4.3: Cloud Provisioning Report - 3 -

Scientific/technical achievements and their impact • The main objective of Work Package 4 (service provisioning) is to produce, describe and analyse a suitable service offering. WP4 is at the centre of the project execution since it liaises: • Work Package 3 where requirements for the flagships use cases are elicited and • Work Package 5 where the response to those requirements is instantiated for each of these use-case. • The main contribution of Work Package 4 to Helix Nebula has been in bringing knowledge and experience of how “services” are actually delivered. This has included, for instance, documentation of the options and recommendations regarding the establishment of a “broker” role. • Work Package 4 has documented many of the service aspects, which have also appeared in the documents produced by the Service Architecture (ServArch) team. - 4 -

Deliverables and Milestones – Period 1 - 5 -

Overall modifications, corrective actions, re-tuning of objectives • Initially WP4 followed the Waterfall approach as described in the Seventh Framework Programme • During the execution it became clear that a more iterative and innovative approach resulted in a more efficient and effective way in product delivery. • Learning in relative short cycles is an efficient way to deliver products with a higher quality • Following an iterative approach means: • extra effort is needed to schedule additional product and review cycles; • extra effort is needed for monitoring the development in requirements (Requirements management); • release management must be in place in order to have control on the progress and development of versions of the deliverables. - 6 -

Exploitation and use of foreground • Knowledge and experience of how services are actually delivered and documentation of options and recommendations regarding the establishment of a “broker” role were the main contributions of Work Package 4 to Helix Nebula • Documentation of service aspects (see also documents produced by the Service Architecture (ServArch) team) • Contributed to the identification and description of the roles in the HN ‘value chain’, elaborated in Work Package 7 (business models) • Above mentioned aspects are crucial for the establishment of Helix Nebula as a viable and sustainable service, incorporating both commercial and public contributions. - 7 -

Collaboration with other beneficiaries • Collaboration between all work packages was effective: • All parties delivered their effort but often based on their own interpretations on what should be delivered or was expected. • More reactive than adaptive (on demand). • Collaboration between beneficiaries became more effective by introducing the monthly Work Package Leaders call (meeting): • Fixed agenda; • Monitors progress by means of issues, actions and results list (minutes); • Platform to discuss mutual requirements and expectations; • Management participation. - 8 -

Interaction with other FP7 projects, and stakeholders outside the consortium • Taking part in the Select Industry Group (SIG) discussions, established by the EC as part of the European Cloud Partnership (ECP) programme.. • Active member of the Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA http://www.opendatacenteralliance.org/) which is developing common user requirements, leading to implementation within standards, for many of these subjects. • Use has been made of knowledge gained from the development of other cloud management projects, such as Optimis (www.optimis-project.eu), BonFire (www.bonfire-project.eu) and Stratuslab (stratuslab.eu) for interaction with FP7 projects. - 9 -

Contribution to the dissemination of project results • Most of the documents produced by Work Package 4 (and the associated documents produced by the ServArchteam) have been published on the relevant web site. • Service aspects have been discussed at a number of internal Helix Nebula events and externally, most recently at IM2013 (http://www.bdim.net/2013/). WP4 has also contributed to position the HN initiative in several conferences such as EUDAT with data infrastructure providers. These have helped promulgate the services, as opposed to just technology, thinking that is necessary for such developments to succeed. • Work Package 4 has also contributed to the Communications Plan and reviewed - 10 -

Difficulties and issues • Difficulties obtaining a clear statement of the Requirements, beyond the technical configurations required, meaning that we had to make intelligent assumptions; • That previously little thought had been given to service, rather than technical, aspects, especially as regards federation and brokerage; • There was a need to act as ambassadors for the need to define a complete Service Architecture, most of which was eventually done outside the scope of this WP. - 11 -

WP4 – Cloud Platform & Provisioning