Role of the EGI.org Middleware Unit
From EGI Knowledge Base
The current environment of EU middleware development consists of distributed multiple teams of experts specialized in one or more services in general organized around the 3 Middleware Consortia with additional teams with complementary expertise belonging to other EU and international initiatives. In order to leverage the existing clusters of competence it is then advisable to maintain this decentralized model based on decentralized teams while introducing with EGI an effective pan-European technical and financial coordination. The decentralization will also leave open the road for the introduction of other development teams, including eventually for teams who developed components on a commercial basis. The Central technical coordination will be supported by an EGI.org unit having as head a Chief Technical Officer (CTO). The main objective of this unit is to guarantee the availability of the required middleware services at the pan-European level with the assistance of additional technical bodies including the relevant experts appointed by the Consortia. These bodies (in addition to the ETCB, transversal including Consortia with Operations and Applications representative, already discussed in the Blueprint and overall steering of the middleware related activities) will include a Middleware Architect Group and a Middleware Technical Management Group which will be more precisely defined when this general proposal will be ready for implementation to guarantee the availability and evolution of the UMD distribution and repository . This EGI.org MW Unit and its technical bodies should be the unique place in Europe where the needs concerning the middleware for EGI will be planned and coordinated, in particular with respect to:
- Common baseline architecture
- Full interoperability of existing services through standardization
- Validation/testing of the released services included in UMD;
- Increasing complementarities and specializations of the included services
- Adoption of application and operation requirements;
- Convergence and interoperability through the implementation of standard interfaces with Globus and other non-EU stacks;
- Definition of additional APIs that will allow independent development of higher level services.
Special care needs to be taken to assure that the UMD software components are easily installed and configured. The goal of the UMD is to make it as easy as possible for the NGIs national resource providers to deploy, maintain and use the grid services that need to guarantee to the VOs teams a uniform access to their resources. Another important objective for the EGI.org MW Unit will be to provide the necessary testing and certification of the services included in UMD to guarantee a seamless operation and interoperation of all the components included in UMD. This will also include provision of test suites for Quality Assurance and to validate standards compliance of considered new or modified already introduced services. To guarantee these functions, we propose the MW Unit should also offer support to a common software configuration, build and test systems. In addition, the Unit will establish effective collaborations on an equal basis to promote the inclusion with their related support of services coming from outside Europe (like for instance Condor and Globus) compliant to the same set of EGI rules.
