In 2016, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (JLU) was selected as one of the five hosting sites of the de.NBI Cloud to provide scalable storage and compute resources to researchers in the bioinformatics community. The OpenStack based cloud computing infrastructure is managed and administrated by the Bioinformatics Core Facility (BCF) at JLU. Since June 2017 the initial setup is in production mode based on dedicated BMBF funded hardware. Access is granted based on a submission of a brief project description that is handled by the central de.NBI administration office.

Use our Quick Start Guide to take the first steps and learn how to access our de.NBI Cloud resources.

For a better in-depth understanding of general cloud computing concepts and more advanced operations you should read through the following sections.

• Overview of cloud concepts
• OpenStack basics
• Access to the de.NBI cloud
• First steps running a virtual machine

• Available VM flavors
• Using and managing images
• Project administration
• Data in the Cloud
  • Ephemeral disks
  • Volumes
  • Using S3/Swift object storage in the Cloud
• Networking
• Security aspects

• Custom images
• Appliances
• Horton Works / Ambari
• BiBiGrid
• Kubernetes / Docker

• Disk image builder
• Orchestration of services and tools
• Documentation of openstack Pike (The release on which our cloud is based on)