Data e-Infrastructure Management Facilities

Overview

Data e-Infrastructure management facilities promote the optimal exploitation of the resources available in the e-Infrastructure and the integration of technology external to the e-Infrastructure. They insulate as much as possible the management of the e-Infrastructure from the data and the data management services that are hosted in or accessible through the infrastructure itself.

The motto at the heart of the management facilities is

less dependencies for more management

meaning that the requirements posed to resources (even independent resources) to be managed are minimal, close to zero in some cases. All the implemented solutions are prioritized in order to pursue this goal.

Towards new directions of openness and interoperability called by our growing community, management facilities move along:

adoption of standards
support for new software platforms by implementing a zero-dependency approach to software management
a second generation of its Resource Model

Key Features

Extensible notion of resource: a resource model which is open to modular extensions at runtime by arbitrary third parties

Transparent software resource management: nearly zero-dependency requested to managed resources for being part of the infrastructure

Environment propagation: operational information among services are transparently propagated over a range of protocols (SOAP, HTTP/S, and more)

Dynamic Deployment and Optimal Resource (re)Allocation: remote deployment and (re-)configuration of resources across the infrastructure

Resource lifetime management: complete running of the entire lifetime of resources ranging from creation and publication to discovery, access and consumption

Self-elastic management: dynamic resource provisioning to meet peaks and lows in demand

Interoperability, openness and integration at software level: third-parties software can be added to the Data e-Infrastructure at runtime, other initiatives can exploit gCube in a standard way

Support to standards: crucial functionalities are accessible via recognized standards in order to enhance interoperability

Multi-platforms: not only gCore (our in-house platform), but also Tomcat6, external infrastructures, and a framework for bridging potentially any software hosting platform