NGS Cloud FAQ

Q. How long will the service be available for?

A. The prototype service is currently unavailable.  Further announcements will be made on the NGS-NEWS mailing list about the development of the service into a production service shortly.

Q. What OS would I get on the VM?

A. In Oxford you currently may choose among Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian. You can upload your own images with whatever Linux distribution you prefer. At the moment it is not possible running windows-based VMs.

Q. Can I install anything within the VM OS e.g. Java?

A. Yes you can. In Oxford you will have full root privileges on all your VMs. Just remember that in EC2-like cloud infrastructures VMs are volatile. Any change to your image will be lost on reboot. In order to compensate for this, you may tailor your own image and/or you may attach a virtual block device to your VM. Everything saved into that device will survive reboot (there is documentation on-line that can help you in this process).

Q. What sort of firewall restrictions might I have?

A. In Oxford your VMs will run in a so called security group. You will have to assign access rules to your security group in order to filter the inbound traffic. No restrictions will be imposed by Oxford on your running VMs and you will be responsible for their security.

Q. What storage would I have access to? (I currently have a 2TB backed-up array that I use, so am wondering if this would be matched or improved on?)

A. At Oxford we can arrange to give you up to 3TB but this will require dedicated configuration and there will be a limit on for how long this amount of space will be available to you. If you need a more permanent solution, options may be discussed.