Enabling Workflow-Oriented Science Gateways to Access Multi-Cloud Systems

In this paper we present a solution to cloud-enable workflow-oriented science gateways. The integration mechanism described in the paper is a generic method that can be followed by other gateway developers. The paper describes the principles and the concrete ways to integrate science gateways with multi-cloud systems. The concrete example to demonstrate the integration principles builds on the integration of WS-PGRADE/gUSE and the CloudBroker Platform (CBP). The integration of WS-PGRADE and the CloudBroker Platform offers a complete cloud-enabled science gateway platform for a diverse set of use-cases and user communities, with the availability to use mainstream cloud middleware types and services (Amazon, IBM, OpenStack, OpenNebula). The advantage of the integrated WS-PGRADE and CloubBroker Platform system is that if a domain-specific science gateway is customized from WS-PGRADE gateway framework it immediately inherits this cloud access flexibility, i.e. the user community of that gateway can access all the cloud types enabled by the integrated system presented.