The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Test Validation Suite is an open-source tool for validating commercial cloud services that has been created by members of CERN's IT department for the benefit of scientific workloads in multiple domains.
The development of the Test Suite is a key development of OCRE, originating from the HNSciCloud project, where automation was lacking as test deployments were executed manually, in a scattered manner with no result tracking capabilities.
The EOSC Test Validation Suite framework ensures automated benchmark testing and validation ranging from IaaS cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, and data ingests) to Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), covering the cloud stack.
Added Value
The main added value of the developed framework is that it centralises the validation of cloud services across the stack, providing tests and benchmarks that are representative examples of scientific workloads in multiple domains. This allows researchers to quickly validate services by giving them working examples before they establish cloud contracts and adopt services.
Check out the presentation of the test suite on the video, or for a snapshot of the test suite during its implementation, see the presentation on the test suite on April 2022.
Applications and Impact
While the initial version of the Test Suite was developed during the OCRE project's lifetime, it is also being used in other projects, such as ARCHIVER and CloudBankEU, expanding its applicability beyond the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stack, enriching its test catalogue, and maturing a future service operation model.
As the EOSC Test Validation Suite evolves, its applicability is expanding to include the validation of the functionality of publicly funded services, ensuring that EOSC core services are aligned with the established requirements, and providing the ability to validate and differentiate the capabilities of services that EOSC exchange service providers deliver.
Given its evolution, the EOSC Test Validation Suite is listed as a key exploitable result of the OCRE project, and, as such, expected to be adopted by the European Open Science Cloud core, as a support tool service for researchers that require heterogeneous commercially or publicly funded cloud services to be validated.