Developer Cloud Sandboxes solution

h1. Welcome to the Developer Cloud Sandbox user guides

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h2. Introduction

* New to the project? Please consult the [[Getting Started]] page in order to get your own Sandbox and integrate your Earth Observation application.

* The user manual of the Sandbox Dashboard for Service Administration is upcoming.

h2. Sandbox tutorials for the developer

* [[Sandbox Application Integration Tutorial]] is a step-by-step guide for the integration of the GMTSAR data processing application.

* ...

h2. Sandbox reference guides for the developer

* The [[Sandbox Reference]] is the complete guidebook of all the Sandbox Management functions.

* The [[Sandbox Concepts and Terminology]]: the project's concepts and terminology

* The [[Sandbox FAQ]]: the Sandbox service's Frequently Asked Questions

h2. Developer Cloud Sandbox Objectives

The Developer Cloud Sandbox service equips Scientists to develop, test and validate their applications within a virtualized environment, and seamlessly enable them for high-performance distributed computing; prior to their deployment and exploitation.

With this service, Scientists can also better test and share with the community the full lifecycle of their research activities and applications.

The Sandbox Service then aims at exploiting the Cloud Computing paradigm and existing Cloud Providers for a hand-off management of non-critical systems that are compute intensive; in particular the applications developed on Sandboxes.

Additionally, and particularly important for scientific communities around ESA programmes (such as CCI, STSE, DUE, GMES,...) the service eases the deployment of scientific applications to the ESA's G-POD computing clusters, reducing their integration costs and time.

h2. Serving scientific communities

Terradue's Platform and Developer Cloud Sandboxes service are leveraging a Cloud middleware and infrastructure to support Earth Sciences applications, developed by Scientists on virtual machines or "Sandboxes". The service exploits at best the Cloud Computing paradigm for hand-off management of non-critical systems and to develop services allowing Scientists to develop and test their new applications within a virtual platform; prior to their deployment and exploitation.

Since 2006, ESA Grid Processing on-demand (G-POD, http://gpod.eo.esa.int) has provided a processing environment coupled with a huge amount of Earth Observation (almost 300TB) for science applications. The so-called G-POD Cathegory-1 project, addressed to Principal Investigators (PI), has seen over forty science projects operated in G-POD. High-level products were generated, and new sensor synergies were discovered thanks to the Grid driven processing power offered to scientists via G-POD.

Today, with the Cloud Computing Sandbox Service, Scientists are provided with an Cloud based application development environment to implement and test their applications. Within the Developer Cloud Sandbox, scientists can find the same environment as they have on their local workstation, and are provided with data discovery and access tools, project management tools suite (e.g. ticketing, versioning, wiki) and a document management system. Once implemented and tested on a sandbox, the application is then deployed to run over full dataset series.

User Sandbox Administration tools are supporting scientific goals such as management of user groups, sharing of an experiment's method and results as a Virtual Machine (e.g. for peer-reviews), or the reproducibility of an experiment by other research communities. As the Developer Cloud Sandboxes communities are growing (ESA, CNR IREA, UNESCO IOC, ECMWF...) we feel just at the beginning of an exciting way of doing research work.