Short descriptionELIXIR CC (Task 8.1)
Type of community

Competence Center

Community contactSusheel Varma
InterviewerGergely Sipos
Date of interviewbetween Jan-July 2018

User stories

No.

User stories

US1


ELIXIR wants to establish a federation of cloud sites, each providing storage and compute capacity for researchers. The federated clouds should be connected to a data replication service (Reference Data Set Distribution Service with the ELIXIR terminology - RDSDS) that enables ELIXIR to stage 'ELIXIR Core Data Resources' to the cloud sites on-demand. As a result, the cloud sites become data hosting nodes which are equipped with CPUs/GPUs and are suited for large-scale data analysis and analytics.

Centrally provided and curated datasets can ensure high quality research in any of the partner states/regions. Researchers can go to their 'local' ELIXIR cloud provider, choose an already pre-staged ELIXIR dataset or request the staging of an ELIXIR dataset, choose an application of their choice (from a VM catalogue or container catalogue), maybe upload some additional data and then perform data analysis/analytics.

Different conditions of access may apply at the different cloud sites, but it is expected that the cloud compute resources would be free at point of use for national/local researchers, while pay-for-use or other special conditions apply for foreigners.

The replication of community assets to national cloud providers maximises the utilisation of national funding and lowers the total cost of access for researchers.

The services in the setup should recognise users via their ELIXIR identity, therefore ELIXIR AAI (Life science AAI) should be integrated with the RDSDS as well as with the national clouds.

US2

The cloud federation can be also equipped with an ‘application replication and orchestration service’ that enables application providers to deploy community/reference applications to any of the federated cloud sites, and users to instantiate and use the applications on those sites.

The services in the setup should recognise users via their ELIXIR identity, therefore ELIXIR AAI (Life science AAI) should be integrated with the RDSDS as well as with the national clouds.




Use cases

A use case is a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role (known in the Unified Modeling Language as an actor) and a system to achieve a goal.

Include in this section any diagrams that could facilitate the understanding of the use cases and their relationships.


Step

Description of action

Dependency on 3rd party services (EOSC-hub or other)

UC1

Joining the cloud federation with a cloud site (cloud provider perspective):

  1. AAI integration
  2. Connect cloud to the RDSDS
  3. Connect cloud to the reference application distribution service
  4. Policy compliance with policies (ELIXIR, EGI cloud, and EOSC-hub policies)

EOSC-hub centrally provided data distribution service (a new requirement to EOSC-hub!)

EOSC-hub centrally provided application distribution and orchestration service (a new requirement to EOSC-hub)

ELIXIR cloud federation policies, protocols and interfaces. (under definition)

UC2

Making reference/core datasets available for replication to the federated cloud providers (data provider perspective):

  1. ...use EOSC-hub FTS service...
  2. ...
Same as above.

UC3

Requesting the replication of a reference/core dataset to my local cloud (researcher perspective):

  1. ...use EOSC-hub FTS service...
  2. ...
Same as above.
UC4

Making virtualised, reference/core applications available for replication and orchestration on the federated cloud providers (data provider perspective):

  1. ...use EOSC-hub 'Kubernetes as a Service'...
Same as above.
UC5

Requesting the replication of a reference/core application to my local cloud (researcher perspective):

  1. ...use EOSC-hub 'Kubernetes as a Service'...
  2. ...
Same as above.



Requirements

Technical Requirements


Requirement number

Requirement title

Link to Requirement JIRA ticket

Source Use Case

RQ1

EOSC-hub to provide an FTS data transfer service

UC1, 2, 3

RQ2

EOSC-hub to provide Kubernetes as a service

UC1, 4, 5


Capacity Requirements

The cloud capacity will initially come from the ELIXIR CC members (EBI, CESNET, CSC). Others will join in a second stage. 

Capacity requirements for the centrally provided EOSC-hub FTS:

Capacity requirements for the centrally provided Kubernetes as a service: