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As a user of the STFC Cloud, you are responsible for your machines (see Terms Of Service ), whilst the Cloud team is responsible for the Cloud the supplied OS images. This article describes the do’s and don’ts dont's of using a VM on the STFC Cloud.

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We recommend getting rid of VMs at an age of 6 months if possible, and older than a year is usually not ideal. If your machines are approaching this age, consider migrating to newer flavors. It is also suggested that VMs are rebooted about every 6 weeks, as this allows some updates to be applied.

High

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Availability

Don’t have your services dependent on just one VM (if the VM goes down, so does the service!). Instead make architect your service have high availabilityin a highly available manner, spreading it across multiple machines with a single-entry point. This can be done with loadbalancers and kubernetes clusters.

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Configuration management is your friend - it can be used to create machines with packages automatically installed and configured for you. This can be done with configuration management software such as ansible (see our advanced workshop for more information).

Data storage

Use Volume Management in OpenStack or other non-root-disk storage so that data isn’t lost when cycling VMs. STFC Cloud has a variety of different storage solutions, with different use-cases:

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• Keeping a VM up for years

• Not keeping up to date with security patches (This is against terms of service and could result in your VM being terminated)

• Keeping VMs on deprecated flavors (such as c-flavors)

• Removing the Cloud admin SSH key (this means that we are limited in being able to provide support) (This is against terms of service and could result in your VM being terminated)

Finally, the Cloud team are here to help - submit a ticket if you have issues or use the Slack to ask questions.

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