EGI is Hiring Only 11 months to Christmas and already the good stuff is rolling in: EGI is looking for a Senior Operations Officer, find out more -> https://t.co/8FpDo4Ta4OApply by 28 February 2019!— EGI (@EGI_eInfra) January 25, 2019 I’m here to tell you that you should apply for this job, because it’s one of the best things anyone can do. How do I know? Well, it’s actually my job – for the next few weeks at least. After that, it’s going to belong to someone awesome, maybe someone like you! I joined the EGI Foundation at the beginning of March...…

The EGI High-Throughput Compute Execution Environment The EGI High-Throughput Compute Execution Environment Contained environments before containers Addressing the issue Design principles Building an appropriate model Data concerns Deterministic, Idempotent Configuration Functions An example: Service VOs required at EGI sites References and Footnotes Let's start at the beginning. EGI offers several services to researchers. One of the most widely-used, indeed the service that kicked this all off, is the high-throughput compute1 service. This is a massive service, offering many hundreds of thousands of CPU cores across more than 300 sites. The characteristics of that service mentioned in the catalogue include Access...…

A massive issue has been lurking beneath the success of e-infrastructures like EGI: the complexity of configuration management in a widely-distributed, federated environment. Ansible in the UMD world Site configuration management The benefits of many tools Pair Programming Cross-validated deployments A healthy ecosystem UMD in the Ansible world The EGI Style Guide One role, many scenarios Testing and Trusting Better use of existing infrastructure Improving use of Ansible Galaxy Redistributing build artefacts for immediate re-use Raise Vulnerabilities in Staging DevOps Summary References and Footnotes The stability, availability and performance of the infrastructure over the years is a testament to the...…

Earlier today we had a discussion about some confusing information on the EGI website. This led us to discuss what should be there, what shouldn’t be there, what content or links were broken, and what we could do to improve the experience of using our website. In short, it felt like a typical user experience (UX) interview. There were a few areas for improvement, and a few “just plain errors”, which was all-in-all very useful feedback. In order for that not to go to waste, it would have been nice to capture that user story with some features and scenarios,...…

TL;DR We made a style guide - this is how it works in practice. A few weeks ago, I announced a style guide for developing Ansible roles. The intended audience is the developers of middleware components1 and the aim of the guide is to improve or ability to collaborate, and to deliver products smoothly and reliably, without breaking the infrastructure in general. A typical case would be an existing product which performs some specific function e.g., a storage management front-end service. Another case would be the one I want to use as an example here - the so-called “worker-node” function....…