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 The aims of this SIG are

• To provide a broader forum for gathering and exchanging experiences, ideas and knowledge on the development, deployment, testing and standardisation of cloud infrastructure software stacks, platforms and workflows.
  
  
• To share deployment and operations best practices about all the pillars of the cloud infrastructure. Be the primary community forum in the confluence of computing, storage and networking.Leverage the existing focus groups includeing CS3 (CERN) on sync&share and storage and OSO (SWITCH) on infrastructre as a serice and OpenStack operations.
  
  
• To stimulate joint efforts in solving everyday operational issues, developing software components as needed, building and maintaining infrastructure and platforms, including shared / transnational deployments, conducting PoCs, defining functional and quantitative tests. Press into service permanent systems for benchmarking as developed by the open source community, explicitly including work being performed in applicable GÉANT SAs and JRAs; assess their suitability for the private cloud case; and where applicable, feed back requirements and improvement opportunities.
  
  
• To improve awareness of software and hardware solutions available on the market and infrastructures, platforms and services provided by NRENs in the area of (federated) cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, data storage, management, automation and big data, and act as a launch pad for joint procurements and/or brokering thereof as appropriate and necessary.
  
  
• To help identify current and future requirements and workflows of the scientific/academic community related to computing, storage, data management infrastructure, platforms, services and applications as well as preparing NRENs to address these needs.
  
  
• To provide an interface among operators and owners of the cloud computing and storage infrastructure (IT experts) and the actual users i.e. individuals, academic institutions, communities and collaborations (domain experts), that enables mutual understanding of needs and capabilities as well as challenges and opportunities.
  
  
• To define, stabilise and promulgate mutually agreed upon APIs as exported by NREN cloud stacks, preferably globally recognised APIs that cloud users can rely on to build their use case upon, and be guaranteed that their use case will in fact work, and be as portable as possible among NRENs.
  
  
• To engage with RDA, SIG-Greenhouse, TF-RED, EUDAT, PRACE and other related groups. Aim for a common cloud platform for execution, plugging in workflows from researchers. Commercial clouds are different, research clouds should be similar. Engage with the Scientific Working Group and Large Deployment Team of the OpenStack community.

The proposed achievements and KPIs for the first year are summarized in the table below