About CODE-DE Cloud Infrastructure

The CODE-DE cloud is hosted on CloudFerro’s EO cloud located in Frankfurt/Germany - its technical name being “FRA1-1” . EO cloud in this context means that large compute resources are connected to a central storage repository hosting several Petabytes of Earth Observation (EO) data.

The cloud environment is set up and operated using the open source cloud computing software OpenStack. OpenStack controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources, all managed through APIs or a dashboard. It provides components for orchestration, fault management and service management amongst other services to ensure high availability of user applications. In CODE-DE, the OpenStack component Horizon (also referred to as “OpenStack dashboard”) allows users to manage their individual cloud resources.

CODE-DE compute resources consist of CPUs and GPUs, as well as memory (RAM) components. The CODE-DE data storage pool is realized using the open-source software-defined storage platform Ceph and is composed of two main building blocks:

• Network HDD storage - as a cost efficient, reliable, very resilient and immensely big storage pool. This storage is available to users both as block (volumes) and object (S3) storage. The entire CODE-DE EO data repository is hosted on HDD S3 object storage.
• Network SSD storage – a fast, reliable and resilient storage. It is a default storage media for VMs. VM related storage and volume SSD storage are stored on this type of media.

For projects with large data volume storage requirements, the use of S3 object storage is recommended. SSD storage should only be used if very fast data access is required.
Compute and storage components can be combined and used in VMs. The Horizon dashboard leads users through the process of defining their individual VM’s tailored to the specific project needs.