LHC Tunnel

LHC Tunnel

Saturday 19 January 2019

OpenStack In Production - moving to a new home


During 2011 and 2012, CERN IT took a new approach to how to manage the infrastructure for analysing the data from the LHC and other experiments. The Agile Infrastructure project was formed covering service provisioning, configuration management and monitoring by adopting commonly used open source solutions with active communities to replace the in house tool suite.



In 2019, the CERN cloud managed infrastructure has grown by a factor of 10 compared to the resources in 2013. This has been achieved in collaboration with the many open source communities we have worked with over the past years, including
  • OpenStack
  • RDO
  • CentOS
  • Puppet
  • Foreman
  • Elastic
  • Grafana
  • Collectd
  • Kubernetes
  • Ceph
These experiences have been shared with over 40 blogs and more than 100 different talks at open source events during this time from small user groups to large international conferences. 

The OpenStack-In-Production blog has been covering the experiences, with a primary focus on the development of the CERN cloud service. However, the challenges of the open source world are now covering many more projects so it is time to move to a new blog to cover not only work on OpenStack but other communities and the approaches to integrated these projects into the CERN production infrastructure.

Thus, this blog will be moving to its new home at https://techblog.web.cern.ch/techblog/, incorporating our experiences with these other technologies. For those who would like to follow a specific subset of our activities, there are also taxonomy based content to select new OpenStack articles at https://techblog.web.cern.ch/techblog/tags/openstack/ and the legacy blog content at https://techblog.web.cern.ch/techblog/tags/openinfra/.

One of the most significant benefits we've found from sharing is receiving the comments from other community members. These often help to guide us in further investigations on solving difficult problems and to identify common needs to work on together upstream.

Look forward to hearing from you all on the techblog web site.

References