Gee, I could have had a VO: Cloud-based COmanage

Chris Hubing and Jim Leous

What’s a CO?A “Collaborative Organization” is our namefor a Virtual Organization which employssoftware to collaborate. Initially, our COs

have been well established VOs, but recentlywe’ve been approached by interdisciplinary

research groups.

S&E Indicators 2008•The share of publications with authors

from multiple institutions grew from 40% to 61% from 1988 to 2005.

•Coauthored articles with only domestic bylines grew from 32% to 41%.

•Articles with institutions from multiple countries as an indication of further “globalization of science” grew from 8% to 20%

More S&E Indicators

•Between 1995 and 2005, coauthorship with international authors increased by 9 percentage points for authors in the federal government and academia.

•Of the S&E fields, astronomy had the highest rates of international authorship at 58%.

Central IT Support?

•Lit search -- Refworks, zotero, del.icio.us

•Research IS -- Kuali Coeus, homegrown

•Grant writing -- wikis, Google Docs

•Data Management -- Portals and CMSs

•Archives -- Fedora, Duraspace, CMSs

Increasingly, we support this Cyberinfrastructurewith Web apps or interfaces to existing clusters,instruments, observatories, and archives.

CO examples

•DoE Energy Frontier Research Center (Confluence wiki)

•Biology 110 “wikibook” (Confluence wiki)

•LIGO: Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Confluence wiki, Grouper, Shibboleth)

Enter COmanage

•COmanage is a framework

•COmanage moves the identity and access management out of individual tools and into the collaboration

•COmanage allows tools to work together in the same IAM framework

How it works•“Domesticated Applications”

externalize authentication and authorization.

•A Shibbolized interface allows access/controls authorization to that suite of “domesticated applications.”

•COmanage enables the CO by importing individual attributes from the home institutions and aggregating them with CO specific attributes.

Domesticated Apps

•Sympa

•Confluence

•Bedework

•OpenMeeting

•Dimdim

Wish List

•Drupal

•Foodle/Doodle

•LMS software

•Twiki

Packaging COmanage

•Original COmanage packaged as Debian Linux images

•LIGO “Hackathon” at Cal Tech proved VMware was useful

•Packaging COmanage as VMs

What’s in the Package?

•Shibboleth SP

•Shibboleth IdP

•LDAP

•Grouper w/ LDAPdc connector

•Confluence

•Sympa

Amazon Web Services

•Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Virtual private servers using Xen framework

•Simple Storage Service (S3): Flexible storage with Web service front end

COmanage on AWS

•Create a VM with COmanage, some apps loaded.

•Convert those VM files to an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

•Load files into S3

•Register AMI and make it “public”

•Boot up AMI with your own key pair

COmanage AMI

•Once loaded, you have an instance of COmanage, a Shibboleth Identity Provider (IdP) and Service Provider (SP), and several domesticated applications

•Use existing Shibboleth IdP or make a CO specific one

•Applications use S3 for storage needs

COmanage in a Box

To Be Done (TBD)

•Better “collabmin” interface

•Better user interface

•More domesticated applications

•Other packages (APT) and virtualization environments (Solaris Zones)

Using Confluence as the Comanage

UI

CIC Pilot?

•What Collaborative software could we use?

•Specific COs/use-cases?

•I2/EDUCAUSE has some funding for a virtual help desk or consultant

•“Domestication” and UI design