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]] guide, in order to configure the access to your Developer Cloud Sandbox environment, and understand how to integrate your own application.

* UPCOMING! -- Need to manage your project from a single entry point? Check the user dashboard guide, for managing your Sandbox service, from your web browser.

h2. Sandbox tutorials for the developer

We are developing a complete collection of resources for understanding, reusing and adapting Earth Sciences key components such as Data Processors and Catalog Access Services.

* As a start, use the [[lib-beam|BEAM tutorial]], to check the Application integration folder structure, and run a job chaining sequence using the Developer Cloud Sandbox main commands.

* UPCOMING! -- The [[sandbox fieldguide|Developer Cloud Sandbox Field Guide]] offers a serie of educational and hands-on material, such as step-by-step tutorials for the development of distributed, computing-intensive, data processing applications.

h2. Sandbox reference guides for the developer

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

* The [[sandbox terminology|Sandbox Concepts and Terminology]]: the definitions for the key methods and assets involved in using a cloud-based development platform

* The [[sandbox faq|Sandbox FAQ]]: we also have some 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.