Compatibility and requirements

The current version of DIET Cloud has been built on top of the Amazon EC2 SOAP interface, version 2009-08-15 and is compatible with any cloud system that offers a front-end with this interface.

We have used our own installation of EUCALYPTUS^7.1 as well as AMAZONEC2^7.2 for testing and development. The installation process of the cloud system will not be detailed as it is outside the scope of the current topic. For details on the installation and usage of the cloud system please refer to your Cloud provider's documentation. The rest of this chapter assumes the existing installation and correct functioning of a Cloud system that the user can access.

To be able to reserve virtual resources on an Amazon EC2 compatible cloud system, the Cloud user mush have knowledge of the following resources:

• The URL of the Cloud system
• Virtual machine images' names: the user should know what virtual resources she wants to instantiate. To be more precise, the user must know the names associated to the virtual machine images, machine kernel images and machine ramdisk images that she wants to use.
• Virtual machine instance type: if the user requires a specific type of virtual machine that is specialized with larger quantities of virtual CPUs, memory space or disk space offered. An Amazon EC2 compatible Cloud system offers 5 different types of virtual machines that vary these three quantities. The exact values are not standard. Eucalyptus provides the possibility of per-installation configuration of these types.
• The number of virtual resources to instantiate
• The X509 certificate that is associated to the Cloud installation: this is provided by the Cloud system after its installation and the user's registration in the system.
• The user's key: after registering in the Cloud system, each user receives a key that is used for signing all the requests that she makes to the Cloud system.
• A keypair to use for the reservation: the user must create a keypair that is to be used when performing reservations.