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 "rate limiting for Docker container pulls for some users". When we tried to prepare…
CSC - IT Center For Science - Cloud Team
https://cloud.blog.csc.fi/ · 25 posts · history since 2016 · active
4 Mar 2021
22 Dec 2020
Allas downtime November 2020 - technical deep-dive We 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, but architectural knowledge of Ceph helps when…
17 Feb 2020
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". docs.csc.fi One issue is that /etc/resolv.conf sometimes has a nameserver defined from the build of the image. There is an open CentOS bug report about this: https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=16948
27 Dec 2019
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. Replace cPouta object storage with Allas Make sure all the user data from cPouta object storage moves over. Make…
3 Jul 2019
What is a bastion host The benefit of using bastion hosts 96 Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-as
29 Apr 2019
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! series about different use cases for object storage. Others include for example hosting a reveal.js presentation and NFS…
6 Feb 2019
http://docs.ceph.com/docs/luminous/radosgw/s3/ and http://docs.ceph.com/docs/jewel/radosgw/s3/ these features* have gone from unsupported to supported: Bucket Lifecycle Supported Removing expired files is supported Bucket Website Supported Bucket Request Payment Supported Which got me a bit excited! Now to learn a bit about these and see if they work on our setup and if possible if we can make them work without breaking anything for…
31 Dec 2018
".. it's like attaching a USB drive to the instance. " - Some Openstack trainer in most Linux based distributions I've seen, if you know other ways please comment below!) every time the server reboots is to put something like this into /etc/fstab: /dev/vdb1 /mnt ext4 defaults 0 0 All clear so far I hope. It mounts block device /dev/vdb…
26 Nov 2018
We are making some changes to the cPouta flavours offering 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. hpc.4.5core - 5 cores 22GB RAM - replacement for hpc-gen1.1core, hpc-gen1.4core, alternative to hpc-gen2.2core, hpc.4.10core - 10 cores 44GB RAM - replacement for hpc-gen1.8core, alternative to hpc-gen2.8core…
19 Oct 2018
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 requesting it from servicedesk. Now…
17 Oct 2018
Hello Ubuntu fan boys and girls! provided by Canonical without any modifications. This means the user used to ssh in is now "ubuntu" instead of "cloud-user". In any case, trying to ssh in as root will tell you which user to ssh in as http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/ , select the release and fetch the "cloudimg-amd64.img" - for example "cosmic-server-cloudimg-amd64.img" - which is…
3 Jul 2018
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. a new generation of big memory flavor with 700GB of RAM. GPUs in…
9 May 2018
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. NFS + ZFS + Encryption blog post aws tool and reveal.js to upload a presentation at a nice https://mypresentation20180423.object.pouta.csc.fi/index.html URL. automatic redirection to index.html with HAProxy if there is no…
24 Apr 2018
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. NFS which is used for file sharing within project network ZFS which is used as encrypting file storage Ansible which is used for configuration management S3 as the chosen API for uploading objects.…
14 Mar 2018
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://pouta.blog.csc.fi/2018/01/objectively-speaking-in-cpouta.html where we announced object storage! *) maintenance for our Object Storage customers. CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.…
12 Feb 2018
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 decisions and their backing thought process. Some background information: cPouta uses OpenStack as the underlying cloud…
31 Jan 2018
We're pleased to release one of the most sought after features in cPouta - object storage! documentation. This cat lives in the cPouta object storage. What is Object Storage? You do not need to set up a virtual machine to serve or receive the data. The data can be accessed from anywhere using the same URL. The data can have…
9 Jan 2018
Three serious CPU vulnerabilities were revealed last week, and they require immediate action. Both we as providers and you as customers are affected. Update the kernels on your virtual machines and reboot your virtual machines. 2018-01-10 13:45: Ubuntu has released new kernel patches, which should work. We recommend upgrading the kernels on Ubuntu and rebooting the virtual machines. Why is…
8 Jan 2018
The ePouta and cPouta user guides have been combined on https://research.csc.fi/pouta-user-guide https://research.csc.fi/pouta-application page. While the flavors are in the normal flavor page. epouta.csc.fi login page with links to the user guide and to a FAQ entry about resetting passwords.
14 Dec 2017
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. or assigned IP will be 0,2…
22 Sept 2017
Today we're launching GPGPU (General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) flavors on cPouta! 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 is being shared with the CSC Super Cluster Taito; we can move GPGPUs…
18 Aug 2017
Introduction the container orchestration chapter of the Pouta user guide. This is a technology preview feature for now, so there are some limitations that you should be aware of. Those are listed at the end of the documentation page. Awesome-Kubernetes list of curated links about the topic. There you will find many introductory articles on Kubernetes, links to various related…
7 Jul 2017
here. anti-affinity server group.
17 Feb 2017
Many times we've been asked "How do I log in again?" https://research.csc.fi/accounts-and-projects https://pouta.csc.fi and log in to your heart's content. Please note that Haka logins only work with the web interface for now. We're looking into the option of enabling this for API and command line access in the future. Your CSC Cloud Team
13 Dec 2016
Run of the Mill 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 contacted users about their migration options for HPC storage volumes still attached to…