11 March 2013
Dear TCD pilot participants, all, This is my regular e-mail update on the progress of the TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive pilot. You can always take a look at the latest updates at https://confluence.terena.org/display/CloudStorage/Phase+II+-+OPEN My last update was in December 2012, my apologies for the long radio silence. The actual figures of the pilot are as follows: - The total number of platform test/dev installations has raised to 9 (+2): TERENA, PSNC, BELNET, CESNET, GRNET, FCCN, Srce/CARNet, RNP, CESCA - 46 user accounts (+0) are enabled on the TERENA pilot service at https://tc2.terena.org - The cloud-pilot mailing list has 62 members (+1). The small increase in these figures during the last 3 months means that the interest generated by the pilot within the TERENA community has reached its maximum and stabilised around those numbers. *Major milestones* As it was reported at the last TF-Storage meeting in Berlin (take a look at my slides http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-storage/ws14/slides/2013036-TCDpilot.pdf) the pilot has reached several major milestones: 1) CESNET (Jakub Peisar) has done the performance/scalability tests of the TCD platform, the results and conclusions can be found at https://confluence.terena.org/display/CloudStorage/Software+tests 2) GRNET (Christos Loverdos) has implemented the TCD integration with Pithos+ back-end. The code has been contributed to the TERENA Github and the work was successfully demonstrated to TF-Storage in Berlin http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-storage/ws14/slides/20130306-Pithos-CloudDrive.pdf 3) RNP (Gui Maluf) has implemented the OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) S3 API to the TCD platform. The code has been contributed to the TERENA Github https://github.com/TERENA/CloudDrive It is planned to integrate TCD (via the OpenStack S3 API) to RNP's cloud storage infrastructure. 4) CESCA (Lorenzo J. Cubero) is progressing with the Jclouds API implementation to the TCD platform. Progress will soon be reported. These software developments and platform integration efforts allow us to focus on the service development and validation aspects of the pilot in its last month (until April 2013)! On behalf of the community, TERENA very much appreciates the work committed by these people and their organisations. *TCD platform directions* Note that Maarten Koopmans (Vrijheid.net), the lead developer of the platform, informed TERENA that he's going to consolidate the code base; better Scala, less dependencies, smaller code size are expected. The main Github branch will be closed however the TERENA Gitghub fork remains open. Concerning the features and functions of the TCD platform the following strategic direction has been envisaged by TERENA: - TCD should focus on its main asset; maintaining trust and privacy by separating metadata and encryption keys (kept in a trusted place) from the storage data (exported to back-end storage). - TCD should not compete with the feature-rich front-end applications available on the market but broker them to various storage back-ends. - Therefore, TCD should be a thin layer (controlled and operated by NRENs) separating/interfacing end-user application domains and cloud service provider domains; considered to be a "storage middleware". - The integration of TCD should be considered with both end-user oriented storage applications and back-end storage cloud provider platforms. *Use cases and service validation scenarios* In line with the strategic direction outlined above, the pilot will further explore: A) the service brokering scenarios made available by the TCD-Pithos+ and the TCD-Swift integrations; different NREN storage infrastructures and/or public cloud storage back-ends can be brokered down to user domains in a trusted, privacy-controlled way. B) the service integration scenarios with feature-rich end-user storage applications; both community-developed and commercial solutions (such as OwnCloud and PowerFolder) will be investigated for potential integration with TCD functionality to preserve trust and privacy. That's it for now! I'd like to encourage everyone to contribute to the service development and validation aspects of the pilot in its very last month.
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17 December 2012
Dear TCD pilot participants, all, This is my regular e-mail update on the progress of the TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive pilot (the last one in 2012) however, you can always take a look at the latest updates at https://confluence.terena.org/display/CloudStorage/Phase+II+-+OPEN The last pilot conf.call was on 14 November 2012, the minutes can be found at https://confluence.terena.org/display/CloudStorage/Meeting+notes Since then, FCCN (Portugal), CESNET (Czech Rep.) and RNP (Brazil) managed to install a service platform instance for experimental purposes at their locations. The total number of platform test installations has raised to 7. 43 user accounts are enabled on the TERENA pilot service https://tc2.terena.org. The cloud-pilot mailing list has 62 members. Thanks to CESNET, the Installation Guide - maintained by the community - has been significantly improved with useful fixes, tips and tricks. Please, take a look at https://confluence.terena.org/display/CloudStorage/Installation+Guide The various software tests (performance, security, etc) are on-going at CESNET and PSNC. Feel free to offer any software testing effort to the pilot. The voluntary software developers have been working on the platform compatibility improvements, namely: - Lorenzo (CESCA) on the Jclouds back-end API - Gui (RNP) on the OpenStack Swift integration - Christos (GRNET) on the Pithos+ interworking I would like to *encourage everyone* to post questions, updates, useful hints on the mailing list of the pilot. TERENA has created an Github account (as virtual organisation) https://github.com/terena and forked CloudDrive as a project. Developers can be added as members of the organisation administered by TERENA. The main CloudDrive branch is still maintained by Maarten and we try to keep up the consistency as the development efforts are converging. There are plans to initiate a dialogue (and potential partnership) with the Helix Nebula http://helix-nebula.eu/ project as well as the forthcoming GN3+ project could related (SA7) activity. This is still in embryonic phase, we have to see the potentials and the level of uptake of TCD in the community. TERENA has recently received some interest from commercials willing to provide various cloud services to the R&E community. TERENA TF-Storage group had a discussion with Joyent https://www.terena.org/events/details.php?event_id=2473 where TCD was mentioned as a potential service platform brokering Joyent's IaaS offerings to the community. TERENA will continue the discussion with Joyent in early 2013. Keep up the good work in 2013! Season's greetings, Peter
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