RUNNING A CLOUD - THE MISSING PIECES

SWITCH has been running an OpenStack/Ceph based cloud for the Swiss Academic community for the past 4 years. While building, running and maintaining a large infrastructure already is challenging, users expect much more than "just" running VMs. We describe the additional problems that running a commercial cloud entails - and how we solve them. Issues like reporting, billing, managing access, delegating administrative rights or simply the user interface for end users make each need their own bespoke solutions.

The referent Jens-Christian Fischer is the Product Manager of SWITCHengines and the team leader of the "Infrastructure and Data Services" team that builds and operates the cloud. He has been at SWITCH for 5 years and worked on SWITCHengines during that time. He holds an MScIT from the University of Liverpool.

Jens-Christian Fischer