D4.1 Technical Service Validation Tool Published in Repository

The objective of the test suite is to validate commercial cloud services for the benefit of scientific workloads in multiple domains. The development of the test suite originates from the HNSciCloud project, where automation was lacking as tests deployments were executed manually, in a scattered manner with no result tracking capabilities. The initial version of the test suite has been developed during the OCRE project, and successfully deployed in a number of cloud providers before the existence of the OCRE Framework.

Regarding the validation of cloud services under the OCRE Framework, access to the 27 cloud platforms present in OCRE will be necessary. To this end, CERN proposes to include an obligation to provide access to a billing account with a limited number of funds made available by the cloud vendors of the original 27 cloud platforms represented either directly or via resellers with contracts adjudicated through the OCRE Framework. This limited amount of funds will be used to validate cloud services in each of the platforms, to trial different configurations, billing controls, and to validate exit strategies.

The test suite developed by CERN under an AGPL license is expected to become part of best practice, and to be adopted for on-boarding commercial cloud services to research environments in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).