Migration to the new generation of OpenStack cloud services (Completed)
e-INFRA CZ has upgraded its cloud service to improve operational efficiency and reliability. The new architecture spans the Brno and Ostrava datacenters. The Brno site migration has been successfully completed and all user workloads have been transitioned to the new generation cloud.
The migration began in mid-2024 and was completed in 2025. It involved transitioning user workloads from the older generation cloud infrastructure (GEN1) to the modern OpenStack distribution, Beskar.cloud. This upgrade was undertaken to improve operational efficiency, reliability, and scalability across e-INFRA CZ datacenters.
Story
The cloud is used daily by approximately 250 e-INFRA CZ users supported by the flexibility of the cloud and performance of the HPC system’s broad spectrum of research activities in the Czech Republic. The cloud services in the previous generation were introduced on the network of Masaryk University in 2017 and were built on more than 300 physical machines. The design of the cloud service was at that time very smart. We utilized the power of the “Infrastructure as a code” principle, having all configuration in git repositories. Thanks to the IaC it was easy to track changes to the infrastructure, ensure its consistency and integrity, do team reviews and run continuous integration and deployment for automatic rollout of changes to the infrastructure. Over time the technologies used to manage the cloud system, which were our own set of Puppet and Ansible scripts, became deprecated, and better alternatives supported by a broader community emerged.
In order to improve the quality of the cloud service to best serve its users in the national computing infrastructure of e-INFRA CZ, we performed a generational upgrade of the hardware and software of the cloud service. Since the beginning of 2023, together with our partners from IT4I and a Czech commercial partner, we worked on a more robust and up-to-date way to run a cloud service on top of OpenStack. The goal was to reduce the cost of cloud operation, increase the scalability of the cloud to different types of workloads (resiliency, high-performance) and different locations, e.g. in other e-INFRA CZ datacenters.
The solution is Beskar.cloud, our distribution of OpenStack cloud, which uses many open-source tools such as Kubernetes, Ubuntu operating system, Ansible, Prometheus monitoring stack and more. The cloud infrastructure of e-INFRA CZ is based on this distribution.
Architecture since 2024
The new architecture based on Beskar.cloud uses two e-INFRA CZ datacentres in the CZ. From 2024 it is possible to obtain computing resources in the Brno datacentre and in the same way in the Ostrava datacentre on the cloud partition of the Karolina supercomputer.
e-INFRA CZ IaaS cloud comparison matrix
| Brno GEN2 | Ostrava GEN2 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Getting access and cloud resources | Free tier | Available everyone with an valid e-INFRA CZ ID | |
| Guaranteed (group projects) resources | See conditions of getting resources | See conditions of getting resources | |
| Documentation | Link | Link | |
| Cloud welcome page | Link | Link | |
| Horizon Dashboard | Horizon Brno | Horizon Ostrava | |
| Flavors | New flavor naming scheme | ||
| Storage options | Distributed ceph HDD storage, ephemeral storage | ||
| Networking | Single external/public ipv4 network, (ipv6 planned) | ||
| Number of cloud hypervisors as of 2024-01-09 | 11 | 22 | |
| End Of Life | Not planned at the moment | ||
