Phone meeting to discuss the participation to the EGI FedCloud
june 4th, 16:40 - 18:00
participants: 
Enol Fernandez, Tiziana Ferrari (EGI.eu)
Xiaomei Zhang (IHEP), Marco Destefanis (Torino University)
Stefano Bagnasco, Luciano Gaido (INFN torino)
Tiziana briefly describes the goal of the meeting, then Xiaomei describes the interest for Cloud at IHEP: currently there are 3 cloud sites, 1 based on Open Nebula and 2 on Open Stack; they are used by some IHEP experiments, in particular Bes-III, Juno and CMS.
The Open Nebula cloud supports OCCI, while the Open Stack ones do not so far, but it could be enabled.
Bes-III relies on VMDIRAC as application broker.
IHEP aims at participating to a federated cloud, strong interest for a collaboration with INFN (mainly Torino and Padova).
Tiziana explains the EGI FedCloud vision: to integrate cloud resources in a 'common' infrastructure (through a set of common core services) but this is driven by the user communities needs; there are currently collaborations and activities established with a number of countries (among which Canada and South Africa)
Tiziana asks about the business case for IHEP. Xiaomei reports that currently they have a private cloud supporting the VOs of their interest but they are aiming to be part of a cloud federation with other relevant institutions (torino and padova as a starting point).
Luciano suggests that, since padova already partcipates to the EGI Federated Cloud, a way to achieve this goal could be the integration of IHEP and Torino as well.
Stefano says that they will think about it and investigate all the technical implications.
Enol briefly describes the EGI Federated Cloud (see slides). It provides common services (i.e. monitoring, accounting, ...), a marketplace (AppDB), policies (security, quality of service) and implements the same model as the HTC Grid infrastructure.
Participants are free to choose a looser or a tighter connection to the EGI federated cloud according to their needs. Resources are connected through a standard interface (OCCI) but sites are free to choose the interface to be exposed to their users.
To join the EGI FedCloud some steps should be followed (through appropriate documentation available on the wiki page) and at the end the site has to be certified (as in the HTC Grid infrastructure). For a Grid site, joining  is very easy, you only need to define an additional  cloud endpoint.
A specific Fedcloud VO has been defined for pilot activities; however the existing Grid VOs can be anbled on  the cloud sites.
With respect to authentication, VMDIRAC should support X.509 certificates (to be checked).
APPDB allows browsing the VM images, provides the list of supporting sites and allows the endorsement of images by the VO managers. It can be used in association with VMDIRAC which provides a brokering mechanism.
Tiziana proposes to continue the technical discussion in a future ad-hoc meeting; a demo addressing specific technical items could be prepared if deemed useful.
Stefano, Marco and Xiaomei will analyze the documentation provided by Enol; then Xiaomei will provide Enol and Tiziana with some slides describing the main uses cases relevant to IHEP and their requirements for authentication and authorization.
This will be the basis to define the agenda of the next phone meeting (to be scheduled at the end of june approximately).
Enol has provided the mail address of the EGI FedCloud support group (fedcloud-tf@mailman.egi.eu) which may be contacted for specific questions.