SWITCH’s Approach to CloudsPushing and pulling

FIA Athens, 19 March 2014

Simon Leinensimon.leinen@switch.ch

© 2014 SWITCH 2

• Spending time and effort on offerings that have become commodities– Main example: e-Mail (distributed Unix mail systems Microsoft

Exchange plus anti-spam why do we still run this ourselves??)

• Data growth– Centralized SAN/NAS fail to scale economically

• Growing visibility of “shadow IT” and BYOD– These have a long tradition in academia!– Current manifestation: Use of Dropbox for professional tasks

• not restricted to students, not even to researchers – includes administration

Pain Points in Academic (Central) IT

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• University IT observing users moving to Dropbox– Worries about liability and security– Cite concerns about data protection rules and (internal) regulations– Both data and service providers should be located inside country

• In some (small) cantons, inside the same canton!

– Would probably prefer to service their users locally• At least one (large/well-funded) university has their own share/sync service• But most cannot run this on their own

– Submission on behalf of smaller universities:• SWITCH should investigate running an alternative share/sync service• Developed into operational service as we speak (launch April 2014)

The Dropbox case

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• Universities still see SWITCH as the smaller/known (d)evil• Want to limit loss of control and competence• Domestic offers exist, but don’t scale economically

Why not resell {Box,Wuala,…}?

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• To effectively support popular services (e.g. share/sync)• Cloud is displacing the Internet as the generative platform

– You can no longer roll out a new application from the Internet edge– 25 years later, the WWW would wither on the vine due to NAT+FWs

• Public cloud leads the way and can cover most use, but– Lack of (institutional) trust hinders take-up– Charging models sometimes don’t fit– Space for (specialized) suppliers big and still expanding– Limit dependency on (big) commercial players (&keep them honest)– “Target spreading” seen as advisable in the post-Snowden era

NRENs Should be Cloud-Competent(including “production” side)

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• SWITCH is building an infrastructure-as-a-service offering for our community– Similar in spirit to GRNET”s ~okeanos– But based on open-source s/w that has become available since– Aggressive commodity (“vanity-free”) hardware approach– Work with universities for housing (at this stage)– Design service and business model jointly within community– First target audience: Researchers with varied (though not extreme

computing) needs

OpenStack/Ceph IaaS (VMs+Storage)