D2.2: Science Mesh service operational procedures

The Science Mesh is designed to be a highly distributed platform with a very lightweight and almost fully decentralized infrastructure. It consists of several Independent Sites running their own Enterprise File Sync and Share systems. Each of the Sites is expected to be sustainable by itself financially and each of them has their own policies and procedures related to user management, data handling, operations, and security. Finally, each of the Sites has their own SLDs or SLAs with their clients and/or the users for which they run the service. These sites, instead of operating as a disjoint collection of service islands, become nodes in a mesh of interconnected storage, applications and users. Interoperability between EFSS services is guaranteed by the Open Cloud Mesh standard1 (OCM). To this “technical” coupling of nodes through the OCM standard, Science Mesh will add agreed-upon policies and procedures with respect to operations and security, together with a governance structure. The goal is to create a coherent Infrastructure that can guarantee a service level having an adequate quality. Operational procedures to achieve this are described in this document and the documents it references. Science Mesh’s small technical footprint will be matched by an equally lean administrative structure. It is our aim to rely as much as possible on policies, procedures, and agreements that are already locally available, and augment them with what is necessary for the Science Mesh to operate. This will also help with the platform’s future sustainability and funding of activities, by keeping overhead costs as low as possible. In this document several acronyms are used. These are explained in the Science Mesh Glossary.