Testbed Session at ESIP Summer Meeting, July 18, 2012

'Back to: Products and Services

WHAT: ESIP Testbed: Encouraging Technology Innovation for Earth Science
WHEN: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 from 1:30pm-3:00PM

Abstract & Agenda:
Presentations and discussions about the latest developments and capabilities of the ESIP Testbed, to include a presentation on the ESIP portal and new support and capabilities for Testbed activities. Suggestion for summer meeting session agenda: Wed, July 18, 1:30-3:00pm

• (10 min) Overview of Testbed and recent efforts (Ken)
• (20 min) New Testbed Portal - a better environment for innovation and collaboration (Jing Li, Phil, Ken)
• (30 min) Using ESIP services (Christine, Erin) - Cloud, Drupal, Web, Commons
• (30 min) New directions - open discussion on Testbed next steps

Session Notes

ESIP Testbed Session Notes to post

  Portal presentation: mention that roles also includes "public" in addition to member and developer

  ESIP Services
     * Testbed as collaborative portal
     * Issues with ESIP group acct for Amazon
        * pre-paid acct to limit exposure
        * JPL has corporate account
        * There are problems with freezing Amazon instance. Some people did not have very pleasant experience with freezing.
        * If you are using 80% of your machine time, you should own the machine - JPL NASA study.
        * Main problem is to have a common ESIP Amazon account. Amazon does not allow consolidated billing and requires you to put personal credit card number. There may be alternatives.
        * What about Terabytes of data usages, what about its cost? Current Amazon cost is around $100 per months for few projects.
        * Having a collaborative development environment is main problem. Sysadmin needs to open ports for other institutions. This is the why Testbed could not be hosted on local university machines.
        * Owning a private cloud is expensive for ESIP at this moment, but hosting a private cloud for ESIP may be cheaper in longer terms.
     * Frank: where is it practical to use cloud resources and/or purchase an ESIP server
     * James: use AWS to manage VM images instead of considering using gitHub to manage VMs
        * might be a student project to figure out how to manage AWS resources as an ESIP entity
     * Eric - how to manage budgeting/billing of cloud (and other) resources?
     * Reasons for using cloud resources
        * resources that are not secured or blocked - or require sysadmin efforts
        * hosting data?  we haven't had any experience with using AWS to host data yet
     * Consider using the Testbed portal (or some tool) to track progress/status of projects and services.  Had not considered tracking status of services
     * ESIP is evaluating Pantheon vs. Bluehost vs. Amazon Cloud pros and cons. Develop on Pantheon and move to Bluehost later etc.
     * ESIP Testbed Geoportal Link: http://23.23.211.222:8080/geoportal/catalog/main/home.page
     * ESIP Testbed Best Practices Link:  http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/ESIP_Testbed_Amazon_Web_Services_Best_Practices
  
  Open Discussion
     * Christine: sugest doing a plenary presentation at the winter meeting that will explain and advocate the Testbed, Commons, ESIP Portal, services, etc. - assuming that some of these things have gelled by the winter meeting
     * Frank: Consider asking representatives from some other projects that provide user services to talk at one of the monthly telecons
        * project columbia - examples of how to allocate resources
        * others that I did not capture
        * NASA Airborne Science Program (suggested by Steve as governance example )  http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/  
     * Suggestion for better outreach: Once Testbed has a better process, in next winter meeting it can be shown during plenary sessions.
     * Question: How to host server side applications on Testbed that requires separate post and have lots of data?