Speaker
Description
The Helmholtz Association's federated IT platform HIFIS enables the individual Helmholtz centres to share IT services and resources for the benefit of all users in the association. For that purpose a central service catalog - the Helmholtz cloud portal - lists all these services so that scientists, technicians and administrators can make use of them. In this context, DESY offers access to a Kubernetes platform managed by Rancher for all users with a clear purpose to test and try their application deployments on Kubernetes without having to pay for resources at a commercial provider.
Using Kubernetes as a development and deployment platform for web-based applications has become a de-facto standard in industry as well as in the cloud-based open source community. We observe that many useful services and tools can easily be deployed on Kubernetes if one has a cluster at hand, which is not as commonplace at the moment as it could be. With offering Kubernetes to the Helmholtz Association's members, DESY hopes to contribute to a more widespread adoption of modern cloud-based workflows in science and its surroundings. The abstraction layer Kubernetes offers makes for more reusable software in the long run, which would be benefitial to the whole scientific community.
In our presentation at the HEPiX workshop, we will show how we deploy our Kubernetes clusters using Rancher and other tools and which applications we deem necessary to achieve basic usability of the clusters. A major part of the presentation will be on the integration of the clusters with the Helmholtz AAI, resource management and integration with development workflows. Finally we will highlight use cases from different Helmholtz centres that already make use of our clusters and how they gained access and first introductions to the platform itself.
