lecture: Dynamic Service Configuration in the Opensource CERN Cloud

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Automatic cloud management is one of the most popular topic in computer science today. In the latest years Openstack technology has imposed itself as a standard cloud infrastructure. Due to the heavy demands of the LHC experiments, CERN IT department is continuously expanding its infrastructure and the in-house developed tools are not sufficient any more. Therefore, CERN IT service team has started the Agile Infrastructure project, which aims to update the IT infrastructure to be managed through Openstack. In this presentation we will submit a possible procedure to integrate a CERN service into the Agile Infrastructure. As CERN has many services that need to be integrated with this new infrastructure, our goal is to build a process which could be used as a generic procedure for other similar services. The main challenges are regarding the communication with other services, the complexity of the tool itself, but also in the goal to have the process generic enough to scale automatically for next releases and different services. The service we integrate in the Agile infrastructure is the license server infrastructure.

The license server infrastructure manages over 60 different commercial licenses products used by 4000 users. Although most computing applications used by physicists at CERN are open source Linux based software, a range of users from engineering and administrative units rely on commercially licensed software. The management and distribution of these commercial software packages is done centrally, using the license server software supplied by each vendor. An integration of this environment with the Agile Infrastructure poses challenges both in terms of reliability requirements, as well as constraints for the implementation by the supplied license software. Other challenges are due to the continuous change process in the Agile Infrastructure project which is still in early stage adoption at CERN. The main technologies we will work with, are Puppet – a declarative language for managing Linux services and Openstack, an IaaS open-source cloud infrastructure.

The first main topic we will treat in the presentation is a short description of the Openstack adoption at CERN. Secondly, we will present a detailed description of the process to integrate a service in the cloud. This part will describe the procedure for machine creation, hostgroups management, packaging, secrets passing, integration with ldap, updating the service, starting the service. Then we will go through the challenges to have a closed source application integrated into the Openstack cloud infrastructure. In the last part we will approach the future development opportunities for integrating a process into the cloud.

For this project I am working at CERN, Geneva in the IT-PES-IS (Platform and Engineering Services - Infrastructure Services) and my supervisors are Nils Hoimyr and Alvaro Gonzalez.