I am returning from GridKA school, held annually at the KIT in Karlsruhe, where I co-hosted a two day workshop on installing OpenStack with Antonio Messina and Tyanko Alekseiev from the university of Zurich. (You can find the course notes and tutorials over on Github ). I don’t want to talk about the workshop so much (it was fun, out attendees were enthusiastic and we ended up with 8 complete OpenStack Grizzly clouds) as about the things that I experienced in the plenary sessions. A bit of background on me: I joined SWITCH in April 2013 to work on the cloud. Before that, I ..read more

Welcome, dear reader, to the Peta Solutions Blog. “Another blog?”, you ask – yes very much so… Let me start by providing a bit of background to who we are and what we are doing, this might help set the context for the diversity of things you are going to read here. The Peta Solutions teams is located in the “Researchers and Lecturers” Division of SWITCH. Peta (of course) means big (bigger than Tera, anyway) and gives an indication of what we are working with: Big things… We are here to help researchers with, shall we say, specialised needs in their ITC infrastructure. This start ..read more

For several years we have been running OpenStack and Ceph clusters as part of SWITCHengines, an IaaS offering for the Swiss academic community. Initially, our main “job” for Ceph was to provide scalable block storage for OpenStack VMs—which it does quite well. But we also provided S3 (and Swift, but that’s outside the scope of this post) -based object storage via RadosGW from early on. This easy-to-use object storage turned out to be popular far beyond our initial expectations. One valuable feature of RadosGW is that it integrates with Keystone, the Authentication and Authorization service in ..read more