Connecting Workflow-Oriented Science Gateways to Multi-cloud Systems

In this paper we investigate solutions to cloud-enable workflow-oriented science gateways. The integration mechanism described in the paper is a generic method that can be followed by other gateway developers. The paper describes the principles and the concrete ways how to integrate science gateways with multi-cloud systems. The concrete example to demonstrate the integration principles builds on the integration of WS-PGRADE/gUSE and the Cloud Broker Platform (CBP). The integration of WS-PGRADE/gUSE and Cloud Broker offers a complete cloud-enabled science gateway platform for a diverse set of use-cases and user communities, with the availability to use mainstream cloud middleware types and services (Amazon EC2/S3, IBM, Open Stack, Open Nebula, Rados S3). The advantage of the integrated WS-PGRADE/gUSE/CBP system is that if a domain-specific science gateway is customized from WS-PGRADE/gUSE gateway framework it immediately inherits this cloud access flexibility, i.e. The user community of that gateway can access all the cloud types enabled by the integrated WS-PGRADE/gUSE/CBP system.