Ukrainian
The two day EGI-GÉANT symposium included presentations from cloud providers and integrators, cloud specialists and users, from both the NGI and NREN domains. The speakers addressed the topics of cloud platforms, security, authentication and authorisation, technology, standards and user experiences and support. This gave a good overview of the state of play, the current capabilities and the elements where the NGI and NREN community can link their efforts and collaborate.
EGI and GÉANT presented their cloud activities and emphasised that by working together, we are able to span the research community and bring a cohesive experience across the cloud stack: network, middleware, authentication, services, delivery and adoption. The opportunities and challenges of the cloud distribution model impact us all.
In discussion and panel sessions, the attendees talked about cloud delivery from a providers’ perspective and cloud adoption from the users’ point of view. The central theme was how to improve the user experience and service uptake. The symposium made clear that users within research have high expectations on how cloud services are being delivered and used. These expectations are shaped by services offered by big cloud players. On the other hand, users emphasised how their needs differ from commodity and commercial cloud services and that federated community clouds and joint efforts in EGI and GÉANT are important in order to put the right solutions in place - solutions that meet the specific requirements of the community and can be used in a trusted environment. Not only from a technical point of view, but also by providing a governance structure, policies, support model and a funding, metering and billing scheme that fit the community.
Several elements emerged as linking pins between NGIs and NRENs, which can be explored in more detail as they help to drive cloud adoption:
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Standards and interoperability: to be able to federate community cloud services - standards are a key ingredient. Pinpointing the most relevant standards and stimulating their implementation across NGIs and NRENs will help to achieve interoperability. During the conference, several of those standards and open platforms were identified, such as CDMI, OCCI (rOCCI), SAML2 and OpenStack.
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Security: a safe and secure use of cloud services is paramount and the community acknowledges security expertise to safeguard cloud platforms is scarce. It is beneficial to look at how to share resources in this domain and collaborate on security policies, monitoring and vulnerability handling.
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Identity management and authentication: providing users with the ability to log-in with their trusted institutional account across a range of cloud services is an essential component to establish a cloud federation and a wider use of community cloud services. There were presentations about eduGAIN, HEXAA, OpenConext and Perun and the attendants expressed an interest in collaborative follow up activities.
The views from the community
At the end, I talked to Simon Leinen from SWITCH. He said that “it would be great if a platform were established to continue the cooperation that was started in Amsterdam. Because the two communities share an overall goal: to turn the promise of scalable and cost-effective cloud technology into something that scientists can use simply and effectively.”
There seems to be a consensus within the community that a strong collaboration between EGI and GÉANT, and NGIs and NRENs, will be an important tool to advance our goals. Kostas Koumantaros, who works for the GRNET, both the Greek NREN and NGI, told me that "NRENs AND NGIs are siblings separated at birth, therefore this symposium was similar to an attempt to reconnect in their adult life, which is a necessary process to improve synergies and cooperation between the two domains, especially in the area of security and trust."
And Enol Fernandéz, from the Spanish NGI thinks that "the NRENs provide the solid foundation for the NGIs and the EGI-GEANT symposium thus allowed to further improve this collaboration by bringing in the common areas were both can cooperate to provide a better cloud service for the scientific community."
The view from EGI
Tiziana Ferrari, Technical Director, EGI.eu said: "EGI and GÉANT can join forces to help address many of the challenges that research communities are facing when it comes to cloud services, such as identity management, authentication and authorization, trust, technical and legal issues in data sharing and stewardship and scalability of data analytics, just to name a few. I see a growing demand of expertise, technologies and federated services; EGI and GÉANT have a role to play in serving the European Research Area by supporting a wide spectrum of user groups: the long-tail of science, international collaborations and ESFRIs and the private sector."
