Cloud Providers

The functionality provided through the JASMIN Cloud API represents a vast simplification of the functionality available in the underlying cloud platform. This decision was taken for two reasons:

• The target audience for the JASMIN Cloud, i.e. primarily scientists and developers with some Linux admin experience rather than experienced sysadmins.
• The limited amount of staff time available for support and experiences from exposing more complicated interfaces in the past. By limiting what we support to the 95% use case, we can provide a better overall service, and give users less opportunity to get themselves stuck.

In particular, we want the following to be controlled exclusively by the cloud admins:

• Available machine sizes
• Available images
• Networking and VM startup

The last of these constraints in particular places certain requirements on the way the underlying cloud platform, and any projects (tenancies, organisations, etc.) created on it, are configured. These requirements are discussed in details on other pages of this wiki (see Implementations below).

The functionality exposed by the JASMIN Cloud API is defined in a series of interfaces that live in the jasmin_cloud.provider.base module. While this should allow an adapter to be written for other cloud platforms, currently the only concrete implementation is for Openstack.

Implementations

• Openstack