Cloud at SURF

IaaS and PaaS at SURF 

SURF provides a range of cloud services designed to meet the specific needs of the academic and research community: 

• SURF Research Cloud: This platform offers a flexible IaaS environment, allowing researchers to provision virtual machines, storage, and networking resources on demand. It provides a secure and compliant environment for sensitive research data and enables quick access to computational power for diverse projects. SURF Research Cloud also includes a software catalogue and the capability to start virtual machines on a range of public cloud providers, enhancing flexibility for researchers.
• Kubernetes: SURF actively supports and provides expertise in Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. SURF also offers managed Kubernetes as a service, enabling researchers to run complex, scalable applications and services efficiently without managing the underlying infrastructure.
• SURF Object Store: A highly scalable and reliable object storage service, ideal for storing large datasets, research results, and archives. It provides a cost-effective and durable solution for data management.

Public and hybrid cloud solutions 

SURF also facilitates the use of public cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) where appropriate, often in a hybrid cloud model. This approach combines SURF's private cloud infrastructure with public cloud services, allowing institutions to leverage the best of both worlds: maintaining control over sensitive data and workloads on SURF's secure environment while utilizing the vast scalability and specialized services of public clouds for other needs.

As mentioned, SURF offers some IaaS and PaaS services, but public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP offer a far broader array of services. SURF provides consultancy and solution architecture to build custom solutions for advanced cloud architectures on public cloud, or hybrid cloud using SURF resources. This includes joint development of prototypes of data-intensive applications for research on commercial clouds.

Crucially, SURF Cumulus is a core cloud service from SURF that provides and manages cloud accounts across a variety of cloud providers. Through SURF Cumulus, institutions can easily obtain and manage their cloud accounts. Other SURF cloud services also leverage SURF Cumulus to streamline account access and management.