November 2020 was an eventful month for Rahti. Our backend storage had incident that affected our production clusters image repository for many weeks. That event is well described in Allas downtime November 2020 - technical deep-dive.Just before our storage incident, 2nd of November, Docker applied ...

Allas downtime November 2020 - technical deep-diveWe use Ceph (https://ceph.io/) to provide software defined storage in our Allas service. I'll try to speak some Ceph here. There may be a lot of unfamiliar terms for most readers here as we dive deep into a technology. I'll try to clarify where I can...

There are now CentOS-8 images available in Pouta! There are some minor issues with the upstream CentOS8 images, so, for now, they are considered to be in "tech preview". We have solved the one we have found so far by temporarily modifying the image to use "cloud-user" and remove the resolv.conf left...

We have released our new Allas object storage service. We firmly believe it will play a growing role for data management, at CSC and for the whole academic field in Finland. Alas, the road to Allas was not completely without pain. CSC also hosts the cPouta IaaS service. It provided its own object st...

What is a bastion host Bastion host just works like a jumphost, through which, we can connect to other servers. It can be used as an entry point to connect to internal servers which increases security as well. The following diagram can be useful to understand how we can connect to our internal hosts...

1. It's bad to store binary blobs in git. This is known [1] 2. A great place to store binary files is in object storage 3. Can we use CSC's Pouta Cloud Object Storage service for this? Why yes, yes you can! This is a post in a series about different use cases for object storage. Others include for e...

We (the CSC Pouta Cloud Team) has finally upgraded CEPH Object Storage Gateway from Jewel to Luminous! There may come more blog posts about other improvements to other of our Openstack services (cinder and glance) which use CEPH. No need to use s3 --signature-v2 anymore! Before this upgrade,  anyone...

Some background: As part of the CSC Pouta Cloud Openstack installation we provide the cinder service. This allows our customers to attach block devices to their instances. A common way to illustrate what this means is to say: ".. it's like attaching a USB drive to the instance. " - Some Openstack tr...

We are making some changes to the cPouta flavours offering tl;dr You won't be able to launch _new_ hpc-gen1.*core, hpc-gen2.2core, hpc-gen2.8core, hpc-gen2.16core flavours. We are adding hpc.4 flavours. We are adding a standard.xxlarge flavour. The new hpc.4 flavours The hpc.4 flavours are similar t...

We are making some changes to our flavor offering . Here's a summary of the changes: We now have even more GPUs in ePouta. The gpu.2.1gpu flavor is now publicly available and each has one NVIDIA Tesla V100 via PCI pass through. This flavor was already added in July but could only be accessed after r...

Hello Ubuntu fan boys and girls! An image containing latest LTS Ubuntu release (18.04 Bionic Beaver) is now available in c and ePouta! This time we opted to use the image provided by Canonical without any modifications. This means the user used to ssh in is now "ubuntu" instead of "cloud-user". In a...

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of new lovely VM flavors in ePouta backed by new server hardware! A summary of the changes: introduced standard-flavors to ePouta; these are the most popular flavors in cPouta.  introduced a new generation of hpc-flavors which have Skylake CPUs. ...

This is part of a technical series of blog post where the CSC Pouta Cloud Team illustrates with words and sometimes figures how to do things with our object storage. The pevious installation in this series was the magnificent NFS + ZFS + Encryption blog post Topic for this post: we will experiment w...

After releasing object storage in cPouta, we've been asked quite a lot about various use cases. Thus we're starting a blog series to showcase some of them. Premise A popular design pattern for Pouta users is to host a data storage NFS server in the default project network and back it up to a host on...

Hello! It’s the CSC Pouta Cloud Team again! You may recognize us from other object storage films such as: http://pouta.blog.csc.fi/2018/02/admin-stories-implement-object-storage.html where we go through in excruciating detail how we configured CEPH RadosGW and why we configured it like we did http:/...

In our previous user survey we found out that you were interested in "OpenStack admin stories". This will be our first attempt in doing that. User guide: https://research.csc.fi/pouta-user-guide While implementing object storage we made a few decisions. This blog post is about highlighting the decis...

We're pleased to release one of the most sought after features in cPouta - object storage! Object storage is now usable by all cPouta customers. It's a new service with new usage models, so for details I suggest that you check out our user documentation. This cat lives in the cPouta object storage. ...

Three serious CPU vulnerabilities were revealed last week, and they require immediate action. Both we as providers and you as customers are affected. Meltdown should be mitigated against immediately. Update the kernels on your virtual machines and reboot your virtual machines.  2018-01-10 13:45: Ubu...

The ePouta and cPouta user guides have been combined on https://research.csc.fi/pouta-user-guide The old ePouta user guide on readthedocs had some ePouta specific contents about flavors, how to connect your site to ePouta, etc. These are now spread out over in (what we think of as) logical places in...

IPv4 addresses are becoming more and more scarce. In the light of that, we'll start accounting for them in cPouta in the early 2018. We will inform our customers 1 month before we turn on the accounting. This change does not affect you if you have a contract with CSC for providing cPouta resources. ...

Today we're launching GPGPU (General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) flavors on cPouta! The servers have 4 NVIDIA P100 Pascal cards - each! They are backed by tons of memory and two SSDs in RAID1. This ensures that you can get the most out of these power-packed cards. This hardware i...

Introduction You can now launch your own Kubernetes cluster in cPouta with just a few simple commands using a new tool called Magnum. If you already have access to cPouta, it should take about 10 minutes to get up and running. You can find documentation for this new feature in the container orchestr...

About a year ago we released the I/O Virtual Machine flavors in cPouta. As of July, similar flavors are now also available in ePouta; you can find an exhaustive list here. The I/O flavors are provided with the same disclaimer as with their cPouta counterparts: both the root disk and the ephemeral di...

Many times we've been asked Can I log in to cPouta using my Haka account? Finally we can answer yes! "How do I log in again?" Not THAT kind of haka. ...but Things are never quite that simple. There are a few restrictions. The most important one is, that you have to have a CSC account and access to a...

Run of the Mill Back in September we blogged about disabling the possibility to create older cPouta volume types. This was the first step on the path to a more streamlined cPouta storage backend. Continuing on this path, we have now migrated most detached HPC storage volumes to standard volumes, and...