EGI Applications Database

Overview:

The EGI Applications Database (AppDB) is a central service that stores and provides to the public, information about: 
•    software solutions in the form of native software products and virtual appliances,
•    the programmers and the scientists who are involved, and
•    publications derived from the registered solutions
Reusing software products registered in the AppDB, means that scientists and developers may find a solution that can be directly utilized on the European Grid & Cloud Infrastructures without reinventing the wheel. This way, scientists can spend less or even no time developing, porting, or even using a software solution to the Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). AppDB, thus, aims to avoid duplication of effort across the DCI communities and to inspire scientists who are less familiar with DCI programming and usage. 
The service is open to every scientist interested in publishing and therefore sharing their software solution. The only prerequisite is to be the owner of a valid account. After that, users are able to take advantage of the authenticated, write-enabled features of AppDB and, more specifically, to register their software products and virtual appliances.
AppDB is divided into two main sections: the Software Marketplace and the Cloud Marketplace.
Under the scope of Software Marketplace users are able to:
•    register any kind of software, namely applications, tools, workflow frameworks and instances, science gateways, middleware products, etc.,
•    make use of the light-weight, collaborative release management flow that is supported by the service, and
•    use the repository-related capabilities offered, for delivering and distributing binary software artifacts.
On the other hand, under the scope to Cloud Marketplace, users are able to:
•    register and publish virtual appliances,
•    search for software which is available as a complete solution in the form of a virtual appliance,
•    select VAs and make them available to the sites and resource providers that support their VO, in the case of users granted with the role of ‘VO manager’, and, finally,
•    make use of a dedicated sub-service, namely the ‘VM operations dashboard’, which enables users to perform VM operations (deploy/start/stop/un-deploy) on the EGI Cloud infrastructure sites, primarily depending either on their VO membership, or on specific roles they may hold within a VO.
The primary aim of this presentation is to introduce the main features of the EGI AppDB service, features which are common to both the Software and Cloud sections, alike, and which enable researchers to securely collaborate and share resources in a federated environment (distributed services & multiple providers).
Moreover, with regard to the latest developments concerning the VM operations dashboard, we will provide an architectural overview of the technology that has been used, highlight its main features and concerns, and present use-cases for which this sub-service may offer a potential solution.
Finally, the presentation aims to highlight future plans and directions with regard to, though not limited to: 
•    VM operations dashboard roadmap,
•    other dashboards that may be introduced during the next period, such as a VM endorsers dashboard, a VM security dashboard, etc.,
•    integration of the AppDB service with external preservation services, and
•    usage of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for objects related to virtual appliances

Target Audience:

•    Cloud users 
•    VM providers
•    VO/Project managers
•    Resource providers / site admins

Benefits for Audience:

•    Familiarization with the capabilities provided by the AppDB service.
•    Learn about the new features supported towards the VM operations, as well as, the next steps on the same topic.
•    What plans we have about: integration with external preservation services, usage of Digital Object Identifiers, new dashboards for VM endorsers and security experts.

Topic 2: Services enabling research