Open Stack

Hi Everyone

during the last few weeks we have been working on adding federated 
access to Open Stack. The basic system is now working in our lab, and 
clients for nova, swift and glance have been modified in order to allow 
federated access through a set of federated APIs that we have designed 
and built. The specifications for the APIs and implementation have been 
uploaded to DropBox and are available here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44986510/Adding%20federated%20access%20to%20OpenStack%201.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44986510/Client%20Connection%20API%20v1.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44986510/Federated%20Middleware%20Services-v1.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44986510/UserGuide.pdf

All comments and feedback from the community will be gratefully received.

We currently use SAML as the federated access protocol, since a Python 
library for this already exists, but this can be changed to OpenID OAuth 
or anything else without changing the specifications or the client 
implementations (so we hope from the design). Only the federated 
middleware will need to change, and we can do this once suitable 
packages become available in Python.

We hope to have public demos available by the end of this week, once we 
can sort out the university firewall and other issues.

A use case we have for our federated access is an open source research 
repository in the cloud for the UK academic community.  Since all UK 
students and staff (up to 1 million people) already have their own 
university un/pws, they should be able to login to the cloud repository 
using their existing credentials, in order to store and share their 
research outputs with others. They should not need to obtain new un/pws 
in order to access the cloud service. Our federated access to OpenStack 
provides this functionality. Users who can successfully identify 
themselves as members of the UK academic community will be automatically 
enrolled as cloud users and given appropriate tenant IDs.

I look forward to having fruitful discussions with you about federated 
access to OpenStack.

regards

David