Over the last couple of years, significant changes in the IT landscapes of science and research have brought forth new demands on IT service providers, such as virtualization for end-user services through rapid deployment of VMs. To handle these demands, the state of Baden-Württemberg and several local universities initiated the bwCloud project which aims to create a federated Community Science Cloud.
This talk focuses on the challenges involved in creating the governance scheme responsible for managing a federated system which aims to support 20.000+ users. It has to deal with different share- and stakeholders as well as with different funding agencies to reflect their needs and interests. Coordination within bwCloud therefore includes the development of a robust business model and procedures that enable user participation and satisfaction.
We will present lessons learned during the development process of the bwCloud and describe our efforts to ensure long-term sustainability.
CIOs and university administrations learn how to cater to their researchers needs in a significantly changed IT landscape. Cloud application impacts on local IT of each institution creating the need to update the institution’s IT strategy. Administrators will get educated how to properly reallocate the resources between faculty, computer center and outsourced IT. Dealing with different share- and stakeholders as well as with different funding agencies means understanding their individual needs and interests by representing them as part of the business model. Funding institutions will learn how to focus their resources to generate the most impact. Science Cloud provider will learn how to develop specific business models which are suited for the non-commercial / educational / research sector. In addition we also show how to organize scaling up of resources by bringing in third party funding and setting up governance bodies to effectively orchestrate a federated and distributed cloud service.
