Accessing the NGS cloud service

The NGS Cloud Prototype is not currently available. Further announcements will be made about the development of the service into a production service shortly on the NGS-NEWS mailing list.

In order to become an early adopter of the NGS Cloud Prototype you will have to:

(Please note we assume that you already have NGS credentials and are an experienced user of NGS systems).

1. Provide the following to the NGS Support Centre:
   • a paragraph long description of how you intend to use our Cloud Prototype.
   • one or more fixed IP addresses from which you will want to access the Cloud. Note that you will not be able to register or use the Cloud until your address(es) have been allowed in the relevant firewalls. Also note that for the Oxford Cloud you will still be able to connect to your running virtual machines from whatever IP you want.
2. Refer to the "Getting Started Using Eucalyptus (1.6)" guide in order to register and use our Cloud resources:

http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusGettingStarted_v1.6

Here is a brief summary:

1. register at the following addresses (please register at both to gain access to the full infrastructure):

https://cloud.ecdf.ed.ac.uk:8443
https://cloud.oerc.ox.ac.uk:8443

2. Access the portal and download your credentials zip-file.
3. IMPORTANT (for Oxford only): edit your 'eucarc' file setting the IP of the S3_URL environmental variable to:
   

       export S3_URL=http://129.67.195.139:8773/services/Walrus

4. Use a client to access the cloud resources. You may want to use a set of command line tools called 'euca2ools' (clones of the Amazon EC2 commands):

   http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/Euca2oolsSourceInstall

   and/or a Firefox add-on called 'Hybridfox':

   http://code.google.com/p/hybridfox/

euca2ools have been successfully compiled and used on OSX and Windows (Cygwin) with minor tunings to the makefile. We can provide assistance to set this tools up on your workstation.

Once successfully registered and ready to use a client, you may want to use the OS images already available in order to instantiate your Virtual Machines (VMs). At the moment, you have a choice of four generic 64- bit OS images:

• Fedora 10
• Ubuntu 9.04
• CentOS 5.3
• Debian 5.0

In the Edinburgh Cloud, these images have the following identifiers:

• emi-417F1242 eucalyptus/fedora.10.x86-64.img.manifest.xml
• emi-693712E2 eucalyptus/ubuntu.9-04.x86-64.img.manifest.xml
• emi-552A128C eucalyptus/centos.5-3.x86-64.img.manifest.xml
• emi-4D69125D eucalyptus/debian.5-0.x86-64.img.manifest.xml

the Oxford Cloud has these identifiers:

• emi-D42F1041 Fedora/fedora.10.x86-64.img.manifest.xml
• emi-0243110F Ubuntu/ubuntu.9-04.x86-64.img.manifest.xml
• emi-DEAD1060 CentOS/centos.5-3.x86-64.img.manifest.xml
• emi-DB9B1056 Debian/debian.5-0.x86-64.img.manifest.xml

As explained in the "Getting Started Using Eucalyptus (1.6)" guide, after instantiating a VM you will have to add an access rule to your security group. For example, you will want to use the following commands to allow ssh connection from your workstation to your VM:

euca-authorize -P tcp -p 22 -s YOUR_IP/32 default

You will be able to upload your own tailored OS images into a repository called Walrus. You will place your images into folders called buckets. You will not be able to upload your own kernel or initrd images though. Just use the available ones but if you need it, you can send your tailored kernel and initrd images to us and we will make them available for you.

When you upload an OS image, by default every registered user will be able to instantiate VMs from that image. You can restrict the access to your own images by issuing the following euca2ools command:

euca-modify-image-attribute emi-XXXXXXXX -l -r all

Or deleting the group 'all' from the access list of emi-XXXXXXXX in hybridfox.

In this way, you will be the only one allowed to use that specific OS image.