Recent Advances of the Cloud Platform Delivered in the Infrastructure as a Service Model for the PL-Grid Scientific Communities

Abstract

This paper describes the work done to provide production-grade Cloud system for the scientific communities of the PLGrid Plus project. Our goal was both to show generic architecture of the Open-Nebula-based platform as well as enhancements we had to provide in order to meet the needs of our users and the requirements of the platform. Numerous solutions have been developed and integrated such as the authentication and authorization mechanism working with the standard project accounts and based on X.509 proxy certificates, a group synchronization solution, flexible way to access cloud instances despite the need to conserve IPv4 resources either through Network Address Translation (NAT) mechanism or the Virtual Private Network (VPN). We also describe some security implications, which are crucial in the case of cloud systems.