EGI Pay-for-Use Proof of Concept and Activities

EGI currently operates within a publicly funded research and academic environment providing services free at point of delivery with resources bought from grants dedicated to certain groups or disciplines either by direct allocation or by peer review. With the advent of cloud computing, business models and user expectations are shifting towards on-demand and pay-per-use service provision increasing flexibility and agility. This new paradigm provides motivation for EGI to explore new service definitions by enabling the possibility to provide ICT services that can be paid for the use, along with the more traditional procurement of resources to be managed and offered for free to the owners. This approach also allows researchers and resource providers to better understand costs to access individual services and would enable the creation of innovative business models and pricing schemes

Objectives

• Articulate appropriate business and responsibility models through defined business cases
• Define prices for services from the participating sites (both compute and storage)
• Define agreements and service management processes and procedures
• Identify the tools required and necessary development to faciliate pay-for-use service provisioning (e.g. billing function)
• Analyse the changes within a pre-production environment that would be needed to support and roll out the new functionalities in the production environment
• Evaluate legal, policy, and organisational issues around the full implementation of the pay-for-use model
• Submit a report covering the overall activities and final output as part of the final EGI-InSPIRE periodic report.

Link: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/EGI_Pay-for-Use_PoC:Home

EGI Federated Cloud

• identify issues that need to be addressed by other areas of EGI (e.g. policy, operations, support & dissemination).

Link: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Fedcloud-tf:FederatedCloudsTaskForce

EGI Federated Cloud https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Fedcloud-tf:FederatedCloudsTaskForce

]]https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Fedcloud-tf:FederatedCloudsTaskForce

[[EGI Federated Cloud https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Fedcloud-tf:FederatedCloudsTaskForce]]

• write a blueprint document for EGI Resource Providers that wish to securely federate and share their virtualised environments as part of the EGI production infrastructure;
• deploy a test bed to evaluate the integration of virtualised resources within the existing EGI production infrastructure for monitoring, accounting and information services;
• investigate and catalogue the requirements for community facing services based on or deployed through virtualised resources;
• provide feedback to relevant technology providers on their implementations and any changes needed for deployment into the production infrastructure;
• identify and work with user communities willing to be early adopters of the test bed infrastructure to help prioritise its future development;
• identify issues that need to be addressed by other areas of EGI (e.g. policy, operations, support & dissemination).

EGI is a federation of national and domain specific resource infrastructure providers comprised of individual resource centres. Many of these resource centres have been experimenting with the deployment of virtualised management environments to improve the local delivery of services. Many of EGI’s current and new user communities would like to access the flexibility provided by virtualisation across the infrastructure on demand in a ‘cloud like’ environment. Federating these individual virtualised resources is a major priority for EGI that has started with the EGI User Virtualisation Workshop, and the drafting of the EGI Cloud Integration Profile.

Objectives: