Title: Introducing self-service to researchers

Abstract:

This talk reports about the introduction of an OpenStack based private cloud at the iMinds-DistriNet research group. (1) The process taking away “pets” and giving them “cattle”. (2) Technical and management challenges for managing a virtual environment with very diverse requirements.

Description:

This talk reports about the introduction of an OpenStack based private cloud at the iMinds-DistriNet research group. This group consists of about 80 researchers and works on security, distributed systems and software engineering. This internal project started in 2012 and is still ongoing. The talk will zoom on two aspects: (1) The process: in four year we went from almost 100% shadow IT for experiments, to a single platform for most experiments. This means taking away “pets” and giving them “cattle”. (2) Technical and management challenges: during this process we encountered many challenges related to managing the virtual environment for a diverse set of research experiments: data intensive, distributed, cpu-intensive and security sensitive.