GÉANT Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are established under the auspices of GÉANT in order to create an open forum where experts from its community exchange information, knowledge, ideas and best practices about specific technical or other areas of business relevant to the research and education networking community.
The GÉANT SIG-CISS (Cloudy Interoperable Software Stacks) is proposed to be the successor of the long running TF-Storage task force of GÉANT with a wider scope extending from data storage to general cloud infrastructure software stacks, platforms and research workflows. The SIG brings together those who are building/operating R&E clouds and are willing to share strategy, design, deployment, performance optimization, application integration, interoperability, security and other related information, knowledge and best practices as well as participate in joint efforts aimed at addressing needs of academic environment related to building, operating, brokering cloud services and infrastructure and ensuring their interoperability.
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SIG-CISS Steering Committee members also look after the Open Stack Operators (OSO) discussion group under the umbrella of SIG-CISS.
The OSO Group has a Slack channel at
https://cloud-operators-ch.slack.com/
There's also a bi-weekly telechat room at
https://sandstorm.cloud.switch.ch/grain/Yvp5cGPkhtxPb9pgHYpqpk
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 including CS3 (CERN) on sync&share and storage and OSO (SWITCH) on infrastructure as a service 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, EGI 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
# | Planned Achievements | KPIs | Report Date |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | Refreshing and rebuilding the community. Global live inventory of “who does what”. | 2 meetings, 1-2 BoF at conferences and regular calls scheduled on yearly basis. Public, on-line, living document. | Feb 2018 |
2 | Common cloud execution workflow. Research and education engagement, use cases. | Sketching of a massive, scalable, reliable cloud execution platform with modular work-flow encapsulation, living document. | Feb 2018 |
3 | Industry engagement, federated, hybrid private-public architectures, cloud connectivity. | Regular information exchange with relevant industry partners. Getting in, out and in between of the clouds. | Feb 2018 |
Facts
2nd year of SIG-CISS
February 2018 - March 2019
1st year of SIG-CISS
24 February 2017 - 24 February 2018
The SIG-CISS Steering Committee members are
Maciej Brzezniak, PSNC
Guido Aben, AARNet
- Ann Harding, SWITCH
- Claudio Pisa GARR
- Jan Meijer UNINETT
Former SIG-CISS Steering Committee members:
Simon Leinen, SWITCH
Community
Non-exclusive list of active SIG participants are