"As a researcher at a university that is both member of the national identity federation and has subscribed to the national IaaS offer, I want to be able to access that service quickly and without bureaucracy."
Renata is a researcher at the University of X. She would like to try out a shiny new piece of software that her peers have been talking about recently. The tool would (barely) fit on her laptop, but it would be nice to have it run uninterrupted for several days, so a server would be better. Her officemate had told her about SWITCHengines, so she wants to give that a try. But it’s 6PM and she never registered for SWITCHengines. She heads over to https://engines.switch.ch/ and finds a button called “SWITCHaai login”. Since she had used SWITCHaai before to access the school’s learning management system, she gives it a try. After agreeing to send SWITCHengines a few pieces of information about her, such as e-mail address, affiliation and status, she is logged in to the service. She has a modest default quota which, unbeknownst to her, has been configured by her university’s central IT service when the university subscribed to the service. But it is enough to get her started, she logs in using her usual SSH key (uploading the public key to SWITCHengines was easy), and fifteen minutes later she has the shiny piece of software running in a shiny new VM and starts investigating what it can do.