This is a website for an H2020 project which concluded in 2019 and established the core elements of EOSC. The project's results now live further in www.eosc-portal.eu and www.egi.eu

First integration results for collaborative and federation services

Pavel Weber writes about the main activities of WP5 in 2018

The core services EOSC-hub support the federated infrastructure and provide the seamless access to a trusted environment for scientists for storing, processing and sharing the data. The integration and maintenance of these core services is managed by EOSC-hub Work Package 5 (WP5), a team of more than 50 experts from ten countries. During the first year of the project, our work focused on development and implementation of the initial integration roadmap based on requirements of EOSC-hub federated service management system in accordance to EOSC-hub strategy. In addition, WP5 started  to support different user communities in their integration tasks of thematic services with EOSC-hub common services.

Below I will highlight some of the major activities and achievements of WP5 up to now with a focus on the user-facing services.

An integrated AAI

The EOSC-hub Authorization and Authentication Infrastructure (AAI) is built on existing AAI solutions from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and GÉANT. Our ultimate goal is to is to enable integration and allow, for example, researchers with B2ACCESS credentials to access EGI services and vice versa.

Work is ongoing and is currently focused on improving the initial integration between EGI Check-in and B2ACCESS as well as interconnection with other AAI services such as GÉANT eduTEAMS and INDIGO IAM. A significant attention of the EOSC-hub AAI team is given to support the research communities to gain seamless access to EOSC-hub services. On example of such activity, the AAI team is actively working on is to provide a solution for data transfer management between services that are protected by different e-Infrastructure proxies.

An online Marketplace

The EOSC-hub Marketplace aims to facilitate the order management and to allow researchers discovery, quick access and ordering of the EOSC-hub resources and services. After significant development during the first year, the Marketplace was successfully put in production at EOSC Launch Event.

The Marketplace is now integrated with a Back Office, which automates and simplifies the request of resources and processes the orders further down to service providers. Currently the Marketplace team is supporting the onboarding of new EOSC-hub services. The evolving Marketplace roadmap for this year includes improvements of the process to manage complex orders containing multiple services from multiple services providers.

Under the bonnet

The WP5 team maintains configuration databases such as EGI GOCDB and EUDAT DPMT, as well as the monitoring and accounting systems, and security tools that support the EOSC-hub service infrastructure.

During the first year the accounting services of EGI and EUDAT have been integrated. The EUDAT accounting service now publishes its records in the Accounting Portal. We are now working on improving the user interfaces of the Accounting Portal to allow different views on the records for researchers, service providers or community managers.

The EOSC-hub ARGO monitoring system is significantly improved and has implemented the full life-cycle management of the probes through the POEM web service and automation of the configuration of the compute engine when a new metric/probe is introduced. During this year, a new ARGO Messaging Service based on a Publish/Subscribe Service, which implements the Google PubSub protocol will be implemented. The WP5 monitoring team is almost done with preparations for the new web interface for monitoring of the services for both EGI and EUDAT infrastructures.

Helpdesk and Applications

One of the most significant achievement of WP5 so far was the integration of the EGI GGUS and EUDAT RT Helpdesks, which resulted in the deployment of a new EOSC-hub services xGUS to provide the unified access for all EOSC-hub incident requests. The EOSC-hub helpdesk system is now in full production and provides the first-level support to answer, escalate and categorize any requests or issues.

The Application Database (AppDB) maintains information about software solutions and virtual appliances (VAs), enabling users to deploy and manage Virtual Machines (VMs) in the EGI Cloud infrastructure. During the first year of the project the integration with the Security Cloud Assessment Tool (SECANT) was accomplished to allow automated security checks for all VA versions upon publishing. AppDB’s platform was also extended with support for persistent identifiers (PIDs) for registered digital objects (software & virtual appliances) through the use of open standards, such as the B2HANDLE system.

The VMOps dashboard of AppDB has been integrated with Helpdesk system and enables users to create and assign tickets to resource providers (sites) about issues regarding their topologies/VMs, such as failed topology deployments, networking/block storage issues, etc.


Pavel Weber works at the Scientific Data Management team at KIT and leads the EOSC-hub work package on Integration and Maintenance of Federation and Collaborative Services

 

News type:

11/03/2019