Nova -- A rainbow cloud over the Alps

TL;DR

The paper describes the deployment and management of a reproducible, secure, and expandable OpenStack-based cloud platform at Grenoble University, supporting diverse scientific and educational applications.

Contribution

It introduces a benchmark deployment solution for OpenStack using containerization and demonstrates its scalability, security, and versatility in a university setting.

Findings

Successful expansion with new nodes

Secure data isolation for projects

Operational platform supporting diverse applications

Abstract

A pooled and shared on-demand Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), based on the Openstack software suite, was rolled out on the Grenoble university campus in 2018 and updated in 2019.We present the methods used to deploy and manage the infrastructure: racadm and preseed for basic system installation, then Kolla for Openstack deployment. This latter solution, based on containers for each service, enables a centralised and logged configuration (GitLab) of controllers and calculation nodes. The solution is the benchmark solution for a reproducible deployment of Openstack. We have been able to expand our cloud easily with new nodes. The change in version of the basic OS was also successfully tested despite a few small hitches... As security is a key element in the proper operation of this type of shared service, each project has been made watertight and its data perfectly isolated from other projects, thanks to the encryption of all network flows in VXLANs.This OpenStack infotainment platform is operational. What is it all for? For example, our first users use the Jupyter Notebook through the provision of Jupyterhub servers (web portal); the Distributed Health Assessment IT System (SIDES project); the continuous integration in connection with the GitLab platform; the test for the Kubernetes container scheduler or the calculation and visualisation software, etc. Highly varied uses that other platforms had difficulty offering.Nova, a new platform, was born.