Around the Pillar: Validation suite ready and tested

A key part of the EOSC-Pillar project is the work related to horizontal infrastructures and computing services, the technical efforts carried out in cooperation with our community-driven Use cases and pilots. 

Over the past few months, Work Packages (WPs) 7 and 6 have worked on a structured validation and test procedure aimed at providing evidence on:

• the fact that the Pillar service will meet the expectations of its users within an agreed maturity-level, and possibly a user guideline on accessing and operating from the Service Provider side;
• the integration of the Pillar service with Pillar-IAM Authorization and Authentication Infrastructure (AAI).

This important result was accomplished by deploying the Indigo-IAM dedicated instance for Pillar as AAI service. The Pillar IAM instance is ready to support the integration of Pillar services that emerge from WPs 6 and 7. In order to validate the successful authentication of a specific service, a companion client application was deployed, showing that the authentication/authorization flows work as expected. After the integration is done, the authorization access control will be provided through VO/groups, roles, granting permissions to specific members on the provided resource/service.

This dedicated Identification and Access Management instance for EOSC-Pillar was deployed at INFN-CNAF. The instance is registered in EduGAIN and provides a registration service that implements user onboarding to the Pillar organisation.

We conducted a specific questionnaire to capture key AAI requirements from the research communities involved in WP6, which are offering data repositories services in order to implement their use-cases.  This questionnaire was sent also to service providers of 7.4 in the WP7 which are offering mostly infrastructure services.

The questionnaire provided a clearer overview of the needs regarding AAI solution from the EOSC-Pillar community, ensuring that the process of integrating and federating the proposed services can proceed more smoothly.

As of the moment, the test validation suite is ready to provide evidence of integration activities with AAI, while other generic services such as helpdesk, monitoring, or accounting may be proposed to be used and can be tested over the course of the project.

The Indigo-IAM dedicated instance for Pillar is accessible at this link: https://iam-pillar.cloud.cnaf.infn.it