Introduction

HNSciCloud is Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender for the establishment of a European hybrid cloud platform to support the deployment of high-performance computing and big-data capabilities for scientific research. The project is building a public-private partnership between public research actors and cloud service providers.

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Non-web use cases are critical for Infrastructure as a Service providers. Since ECP has largely been declared unsupported, there is no native command-line option. Research services wishing to use command line need to be connected to a complex AAI that follows the AARC blueprint, which is not suitable or feasible for some use cases. In particular, the AARC BPA relies on an established community to operate a proxy. In the case of Helix Nebula, there is no pre-existing community since the objective is that any interested research use case should be able to purchase commercial cloud services.

Pilot description

Two commercial providers developed a prototype to provide commercial cloud services to institutions, leveraging SAML authentication. One provider chose to deploy a proxy, and one did not. In the absence of a proxy, the approach followed by the consortium was to connect different services to different federations via which they would be made available in eduGAIN. However different federations follow different practices so the experience was rather different for each service provider. In the process of testing configuration with selected IdPs, SPs discovered that different IdP may release different attributes, despite policy frameworks (REFEDS R&S entity categories) being in place to streamline the process.

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