bwCloud¶
Within the scope of BigGIS, we build our platform on top of the bwCloud offering. The Baden-Württemberg Cloud (bwCloud) provides virtual machines (servers) for members of science- and research institutions in Baden-Württemberg (e.g. students and staff-members) much like Amazon’s EC2. Building on the openstack-platform the infrastructure is currently operated by four sites in Baden-Württemberg: the Universities of Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Ulm and Freiburg.
Infrastructure¶
Currently, we run a total of nine Virtual Machines (VM), serving different kinds of purposes, that are providing (1) a single-node Rancher Testing environment, (2) a multi-node Rancher Cluster environment, and (3) infrastructure supporting services (e.g. private Docker registry for sensitive images, OpenVPN server to connect to the virtual private cloud).
| m1.xlarge | m1.large | m1.medium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| OS | Ubuntu 16.04 | Ubuntu 16.04 | Ubuntu 16.04 |
| CPU | 8 vCPU | 4 vCPU | 2 vCPU |
| Memory | 8 GB | 8 GB | 4 GB |
| Disk | 50 GB | 50 GB | 50 GB |
| #VM | 1 | 7 | 1 |
| Usage | Rancher Dev/Testing | Rancher Server, Rancher Cluster (5 VM), Docker Registry | OpenVPN |
Rancher is deployed as a set of Docker containers. Running Rancher involves launching at least two containers. One container as the management server and another container on a node as an agent.
Figure: Container-based Rancher Setup in bwCloud.
While the server runs on a single VM, we set up a single node agent for development and testing environment as well as a five node cluster environment to run the BigGIS components in a distributed manner (see figure below). Both, the dev/testing as well as the cluster environment make use of a the network file system (NFS) in order to overcome the problem of strictly coupeling a service to a node. While this is only mandatory in the cluster environment, it makes sense to setup the dev/testing environment as an exact clone to have the same workflows within Rancher.