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.

• Quick Start Guide: Walks you through the steps to create a VM (Virtual Machine) and ssh into the VM.
• CC-Cloud Resources: Technical description of the available hardware and software.
• OpenStack: more details about working with OpenStack.
  • OpenStack VM Setups: describes ways to provision VMs and provides some commonly used setups.
  • How to use OpenStack Command Line Clients
• CC-Cloud/Maintenance: Status page for maintenance activities and upgrades