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MoUs and SLAs: collaborations from theory to practice

Sara Coelho was at the EGI stand to report on the agreements

EGI.eu aims to provide European researchers with an integrated, reliable and sustainable e-infrastructure to support data-intensive research. This ambitious goal depends on a solid relationship with partners outside the EGI community, but equally committed to the development of e-Infrastructures. Fostering and developing strong working relations with such partners was one of the main objectives of EGI.eu’s first year of operations. Many months of discussions followed, identifying the common goals and mutual interests of EGI.eu and its ever-growing number of external partners.

The User Forum in Vilnius saw the culmination of this work with a flurry of signings of Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with technical and infrastructure providers, as well as virtual research communities. The venue was the EGI stand in the exhibition area and the host was Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu.

“One of the biggest achievements of EGI’s first year of operation has been the collaborations established with software providers via the Technical Coordination Board and the structuring of virtual research communities being represented within the User Community Board,” says Newhouse. “We now have MoUs signed with a variety of middleware providers and user communities. For the most critical middleware components we have SLAs in place that will provide a predictable response to any support requests coming from the EGI community.”

So far, EGI has established MoUs and SLAs with the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) and the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE). The SAGA project (Simple API for Grid Applications), which provides a programming abstraction that encapsulates the differences between middleware systems, became the third technical provider to enter a collaboration with EGI.

“The ultimate aim of the [SAGA] project is to make distributed computing simple, easy, reliable and robust,” said Shantenu Jha, SAGA project leader, in an interview to the GridCast blog. The SAGA software has recently become an OGF-approved standard and has started to be adopted by several e-infrastructure projects from all over the world.

“It’s a well-known fact that EGI is the largest and probably the most important open source grid infrastructure in the world,” said Jha in Vilnius. “Being able to work with EGI is not only important for us in terms of advancing impactful, cutting-edge science, but is also a great way to stay involved with the grid community.”
While MoUs are useful to define a common ground and a general course of action, SLAs have an added value – they clarify how the business relationship is going to work.

“The SLAs with SAGA and IGE allow us to support new grid usage models and to broaden the range of middleware we can provide to our user communities,” says Michel Drescher, EGI.eu’s Technical Manager. “And the SLA signed with EMI is an important milestone securing the current day-to-day operational business.”

The quest to provide a wide range of technical solutions to its user community has set EGI on a common route with StratusLab, a two-year FP7 project. StratusLab was set up to develop open source software that allows users to run customised virtual environments inside a cloud created and managed by resource centres.

“We also want to show that this can be done with grid services,” says Charles Loomis, StratusLab’s project director. Loomis ran a successful workshop in the EGI User Forum which saw more than 20 users setting up virtual machines in a cloud operated with StratusLab software.

In the long term, the StratusLab aims to provide stable and robust cloud software for grid services. “EGI sites are one of our target communities and key to the sustainability of the StratusLab distribution,” says Loomis. GRNET already has two EGI-certified sites operated as StratusLab clouds.

“The experimental work that is being undertaken within the StratusLab project provides an important data point on how EGI as a whole may evolve,” says Newhouse. “This is an area we will explore at the EGI User Virtualisation workshop on the 12-13 May in Amsterdam”.

EGI.eu has signed SLAs with:

• European Middleware Initiative

• Initiative for Globus in Europe

• SAGA project

... and MoUs with:

• GISELA consortium

• WeNMR

• StratusLab

• SAGA

e-ScienceTalk signed MoUs with:

• GISELA consortium

• WeNMR

• CHAIN project