Cloud

The Compute Canada Cloud resource or "CC-Cloud" is a pool of hardware supporting virtualization. This can be thought of as Infrastructure as a Service.

A user of the Cloud will typically create or "spin up" one or more virtual machines (VMs or "instances"). He or she then logs into the VM with administrative privileges, installs any desired software, and runs the software applications needed. These applications could be as diverse as a CPU-intensive analysis of particle physics data, or a web service directed towards scholars of literature and the humanities. The advantage is that the Cloud user has complete control over the collection of installed software (the "software stack"). The disadvantage is that the Cloud user must have some degree of experience in installing software and otherwise managing a computer.

Virtual machines can be easily replicated. One can take a "snapshot" of a VM which can then be started again elsewhere. This makes it easy to replicate or scale up a service, and to recover from (for example) a power interruption.

If you can fit your work easily into the HPC batch submission workflow and environment (see What is a scheduler?) it is preferable to work outside the cloud, as there are more resources available for HPC and software is already configured and installed for many common needs. There are also tools like Singularity to run custom software stacks inside containers within Compute Canada HPC clusters. If your need isn't served by singularity or HPC batch, then cloud is your solution.

Using the Cloud

• If you are new to the cloud see our cloud quick start guide, which walks you through creating your first VM.
• If you have already created your first VM the next step may be to:
  • learn about using the Linux command line in your VM
  • learn about security considerations when running a VM
  • learn more about working with OpenStack
  • setup a data or web server
  • use an available pre-made cloud configuration
• If you already have your VM configured you may wish to learn about
  • automating VM creation
  • backing up your VM

Cloud systems

The details of the underlying hardware and Openstack versions are described on the cloud resources page. The system status page contains information about the current cloud status and future planned maintenance and upgrade activities.

Support

For questions about the Compute Canada cloud service send an e-mail to cloud@computecanada.ca