Speaker
Description
Support of commercial cloud services has become fundamental to many of the NRENs, given that 40 NRENs participate in the OCRE cloud framework, and that the consumption of commercial cloud services by the NREN constituency increases by up to 100% year on year in many countries. Looking into the future, OCRE 2024 is looking at a framework value of €1.5 Bn. The easiest, and most flexible way for a National Research and Education Network (NREN) to allocate public cloud resources to the community is to allocate budgets to specific projects. Users are then at liberty to use the cloud resources they need, when they need them, and as they need them; the NREN does not need to predict, product, and allocate resources of specific types. To do that, however, it is necessary to ensure that projects remain at the approved budget. That runs contrary to the pay-as-you-go model of public cloud providers, where consumers of services pay retrospectively for consumed resources. Finding a way to create and enforce budgetary limits upfront is therefore fraught with significant technical tasks. We report how GRNET has worked for a technical solution to the problem, the lessons learned, and the way ahead.
