StratusLab Reference Cloud Service
Overview
StratusLab has deployed a reference infrastructure and offers access to external third parties in order to test and evaluate the cloud solutions developed by the project. This infrastructure builds upon the stable release 0.2 of the StratusLab distribution and provides two types of cloud services:

A cloud computing site for instantiating and managing Virtual Machines
An appliance repository providing access to pre-configured Virtual Machine images
The physical cloud-computing infrastructure is located in Athens, Greece, and is operated by GRNET (http://www.grnet.gr), the main resource provider of the StratusLab project. The project appliance repository is hosted by Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland (http://www.tcd.ie), which is responsible for the curation and provision of VM images and appliances.

How I can request access to the StratusLab infrastructure?
In order to gain access to the reference cloud service and be able to instantiate your own Virtual Machines you should send an email to [email protected] providing your full name, contact details, your institute and the project in which you are involved (if applicable). Once your request is approved you will be sent an email with the username and password that you will use to access the cloud services.

What I need to access the StratusLab reference cloud?
You will need to download the StratusLab client tools that allow you (with valid username and password) to access remotely the cloud and to control the lifecycle of your Virtual Machine instances. The tools are available as RPM and zipped packaged files from the project’s repository. For more information on how to acquire, install and use the client tools please consult the User Tutorial.

The endpoint for invoking the cloud services is:

cloud-grnet.stratuslab.eu

At the heart of the StratusLab distribution lies OpenNebula v2.0 (http://www.opennebula.org) cloud management toolkit. OpenNebula is an open-source software developed by UCM (Universidad Complutense de Madrid – http://www.ucm.es/), one of the project’s key partners. The client-side tools communicate with the OpenNebula endpoint through the native XML-RPC protocol provided by the service. Additional cloud management APIs (OCCI and EC2) currently supported by OpenNebula are expected to be integrated soon in the StratusLab distribution.

What services are offered?
Currently StratusLab v0.2 and the respective reference cloud service give the ability to instantiate and manage the lifecycle of virtual machines. For the time being, no cloud storage or network management services are supported. This means that the VM storage is limited to the one configured inside the VM image. The appliance repository is publicly accessible from:

http://appliances.stratuslab.eu/images

A mirror of the repository is also available from:

http://appmirror-grnet.stratuslab.eu/images

Initially only three base OS images are available:

ttylinux 9.7
CentOS 5.5
Ubuntu 10.04 Server
With time, more base images as well as virtual appliances will become available. External users will also have the ability to upload their own base images and appliances to the repository. For instructions on how to prepare your own appliance and upload it on the StratusLab repository consult the User Tutorial.

At the time a user may instantiate one of the following types of VMs:

Type CPU RAM SWAP
m1.xlarge 2 CPU 1024 MB 1024 MB
m1.small 1 CPU 128 MB 1024 MB
c1.medium 1 CPU 256 MB 1024 MB
c1.xlarge 4 CPU 2048 MB 2048 MB
m1.large 2 CPU 512 MB 1024 MB
What Quality of Service is provided?
Currently the StratusLab cloud services are provided as is with no guarantees about the availability and stability of the service. We are making the best effort to provide a stable cloud infrastructure but at the moment we cannot guarantee that a VM instance might not crash or temporarily be unavailable due to a software or network problem. As the distribution matures the infrastructure is expected to become more stable and reliable. Our final goal is to be able to offer, in the coming months, a production cloud service, implementing a high-quality Service Level Agreement.

How can I deploy my own cloud service?
You can use StratusLab distribution v0.1 to deploy your own cloud services. The software is open source and available from the project repositories. Currently we support RedHat Linux based platforms (rpm packages) and two modes of installation:

Manual Installation, or
Using the Quattor Toolkit.
How can I get more information and support?
You should direct any enquiries related to the above services to [email protected]. Please use the same contact for reporting problems or requesting any special arrangements for the cloud service setup. Notice that as with the infrastructure itself the support services are currently provided on best effort basis.