Infrastructure Manager (IM) a cloud orchestrator to deploy virtual infrastructures on multiple Cloud providers

By Grid y Computación de Altas Prestaciones (GRyCAP) 


Applications and services require customized computational environments that can be provisioned from multiple sources (e.g. on-premises Clouds, public Clouds, Federated Clouds, virtualization platforms, container orchestrators, etc.). However, the use of these platforms requires users to have non-trivial skills.

For that, Infrastructure Manager (IM) is a tool that deploys complex and customized virtual infrastructures on multiple back-ends. The IM automates the Virtual Machine Image (VMI) selection, deployment, configuration, software installation, monitoring and update of virtual infrastructures. It supports a wide variety of back-ends, thus making user applications Cloud-agnostic. In addition, it features DevOps capabilities, based on Ansible, enabling the installation and configuration of all the user-required applications providing the user with a fully functional infrastructure.

The IM-Dashboard enables or non-advanced users to deploy a set of predefined and customizable topologies (as Kubernetes, SLURM, Nomar or Mesos clusters, Galaxy portal, etc.) on top of a wide range of cloud providers, only with a few mouse clicks. In case that the users have new requirements, we can add new topologies adapted to their particular needs. You can see a demo of the IM-Dashboard on YouTube.

The IM also offers additional capabilities for advanced uses. The IM offers two APIs (XML-RPC and REST), a full featured web interface where the used can define and share their own topologies, and a command-line application to interact with the IM service APIs.

The main goal of the IM is to provide a set of functions for the effective deployment of all the required virtual infrastructures required to deploy an application or service in a Cloud environment, either composed by VMs or by Docker containers. The IM considers all the aspects related to the creation and management of virtual infrastructures:

  • The software and hardware requirements specification for the user applications, using a simple language defined to be easy to understand by non-advanced users who just want to deploy a basic virtual infrastructure, but with enough expressivity for advanced users to set all the configuration parameters needed to get the infrastructure fully configured.
  • The selection of the most suitable Virtual Machine Images (VMI) based on the user expressed requirements.
  • The provision of Virtual Machines on the Cloud deployments (or Docker containers in Kubernetes, for example) available to the user, including both public IaaS Clouds (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.), on-premises Cloud Management Platforms (OpenNebula, OpenStack, etc.), federated Clouds (EGI FedCloud, FogBow) and Container Orchestrators (Kubernetes).
  • The contextualization of the infrastructure at run-time by installing and configuring all the required software that may not be available in the images (either VMIs or Docker images).
  • The elasticity management, both horizontal (adding/removing nodes) and vertical (growing/shrinking the capacity of nodes).
  • Support of standards: The IM supports the TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML Version 1.0 for infrastructure description.

 

Access the Infrastructure Manager (IM) service via the EOSC Portal Marketplace

 

 

Learn more about the Infrastructure Manager (IM)


EOSC Portal service providers can submit promotional articles for their services via this link

 

04 June 2021