The EGI Federated Cloud e-Infrastructure

The EGI Federated Cloud is a standards-based open cloud system that offers a scalable and flexible e-infrastructure to the European research community, and extends the EGI computational offer beyond the traditional High Throughput Computing of the grid platform with new models like long-lived services and on demand computation. The EGI Cloud technology enables the federation of institutional clouds to run scientists workloads, simulations and services spanned across multiple administrative locations, allowing the users to access and exploit its resources as a unique system. The architecture of the federation was defined after a two year period of development based on a set of user stories describing operations on a cloud infrascturues and was officially launched in May 2014. Since then the EGI Federated Cloud operates as a federation of heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service type clouds with every participating provider implementing the same set of interfaces towards users and system administrators. Enforcing cloud technology agnosticism and of supporting service mobility by means of open standards has also allowed for the inclusion of commercial cloud providers into an infrastructure previously supported only by academic institutions. This contributes to a wider goal of the funders to create economic and social impact from supported research activities. This paper details the state of the art, the design and development processes, and the organisational effort that have lead to the creation and deployment of the EGI Cloud Platform. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.