Delft-FEWS and the cloud

Introduction

Delft-FEWS components are being deployed on many different architectures and hardware. Lots of Deltares’ customers that are running Delft-FEWS currently have built an IT infrastructure using virtual machines. The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and overall hardware-resource utilization. When organizations are in the initial stage of (re-)defining  their IT infrastructure, it is commonly recognized that after virtualization, containerization is the next logical step in the evolution of IT infrastructure. Deltares will provide guidance. In our view Kubernetes is the most commonly accepted and best supported cloud computing solution. Kubernetes uses Docker containers.

 A container is a “lightweight” abstraction layer on top of the host operating system. Multiple containers share the machine’s operating system kernel and do not require the overhead of associating an operating system within each application. In comparison with VMs, containers bring reduced start-up time, more compute capacity, more flexibility, fault isolation, ease of management, simplified security and reduced costs. The operational benefits for Delft-FEWS systems are also in line with the Roadmap plans for automation of installations with less customisation, autoscaling and more flexible testing. We recommend using linux containers for the server side components. Any Windows-based forecast models can be separately run on Windows hardware, Windows VMs or Windows containers. 

Delft-FEWS Software: A cloud agnostic approach

Delft-FEWS in the cloud: reference architectures

Explain and visualize reference architectures

• Single MC
• Dual MC (Multi MC?)

Hard- software requirements

Indications of hardware specs for installing the different VM's / containers.

The memory requirements in the cloud are similar as in a VM or on-premise. We recommend all containers to be linux unless Windows containers are specifically required. For Windows containers HW virtualization is required.

Typical cloud related choices (cloud FAQs)

Based on Webinar content / known FAQs specify a number of sub-topics, like

• Use of managed services
• Where to place OC(s)
• How to deal with (incoming, outgoing) data feeds
• Security aspects
• Costs

Scalability

         Kubernetes/Containers

          DevOps (Infrastructure as Code, Automatic deployments of config changes)

Best practices & recommendations

• Project references
• Technical knowledge Komt hier ook de info over ARM templates?
• Involved people
• More info / Deltares contact(s)