Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre

TL;DR We participated to the EGI Operations Management Board (OMB), here’s a report back with some highlights and important issues facing the ROC, both from EGI.eu, as well as internally. There are a few campaigns which we will be undertaking during August - APEL, CVMFS and ARGUS. OMB Summary The OMB is an (almost) monthly meeting where the NGI managers connect with EGI to report back on development activities and operational issues. The July OMB was held today. Here’s a short summary of the issued covered and how they affect us : (here’s the full agenda for the curious) Resource...…

I would like to update you on our progress to develop a DevOps competency in the Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre. As I mentioned yesterday in the meeting, our site administrators are all over extended and can’t be expected to maintain the large and growing array of services that our users need independently. A lot of effort is spent on trying to make services properly configured, and a lot more goes into debugging incorrect configurations. The philosophy that I would like us to adopt is that “everything is code, so we should apply good coding practice to everything”. While the analogy...…

TL;DR AAROC is now in production. Integration as a Resource Infrastructure Provider has been completed with EGI.eu. Sites across the region can be registered in the GOCDB, and take advantage of central tools (monitoring, accounting, etc). To speed up deployment, we’ve put some effort into our Executable Infrastructure repository. An agreement to stabilise an old collaboration. The Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre is a distributed inititive, supported by several projects and institutes, aimed at developing a sustainable collaboration for e-Infrastructure across Africa and the Middle East. The region is defined principally by the coverage of the main regional research network alliances,...…

Welcome ! This is the first post in the Africa Arabia Regional Operations Centre official blog. have fun ! Order, order ! Well, it had to start sometime… five years after we started isn’t too late, right ? The South African National Grid was started way back in 2008 during a quick meeting at iThemba L.A.B.S. where several directors of IT and research groups were present. The idea was simple : let’s put the spare, underutilised, badly coordinated, kit we have at the universities to work, by integrating them into a national compute grid. Back in those days, grid was...…