Since 2012, CERN is running an Openstack private cloud with around 320k cores and supports not only the LHC, but also the services for the whole laboratory. We have been scaling up the infrastructure to cover these computing needs and at the same time we have also been increasing the service offering to include file shares, baremetal nodes and container orchestration clusters among others.
The key aspects that allowed us to scale quickly and be able to continuously adapt to our user needs are automation and integration into the CERN ecosystem. We will review the tools that allows us to offload most of the heavy-lifting tasks, further delegate administrative operations and react on monitoring alarms. It includes solutions for simplify project, resource management and support operations based on Mistral and Rundeck.
Finally we will look into ongoing work on services like Kubernetes jobs, Vitrage and Watcher that will increase even further the automation provided.
