Developer Cloud Sandboxes solution

h1. Welcome to the Developer Cloud Sandbox user guides

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h2. Introduction

* The Developer Cloud Sandbox "Getting Started guide":http://docs.terradue.com/developer-sandbox/ introduces the Application design and integration environment of the Cloud Sandbox.

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 "Developer Quick Start guide":http://docs.terradue.com/developer-sandbox/developer/index.html to check the Application integration folder structure, and run a job chaining sequence using the Developer Cloud Sandbox main commands.

h2. Sandbox reference guides for the developer

* The "Developer's reference guide":http://docs.terradue.com/developer-sandbox/reference/index.html is the complete guidebook of all the Sandbox Management functions.

* We also have some Frequently Asked Questions ! "Sandbox FAQ":http://docs.terradue.com/developer-sandbox/faq/index.html

h2. Objectives

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

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.

h2. Serving scientific communities

Terradue Cloud Platform hosts the Developer Cloud Sandboxes service, so that it leverages a Cloud middleware and infrastructure to support Earth Sciences applications, developed by Scientists on virtual machines or "Sandboxes".

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 Cloud Computing services, Scientists are provided with an Cloud-based application development environment to implement and test their applications with sample datasets. 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 designed and tested on Sandbox mode, the application is then deployable in Cluster mode, to run over larger, full dataset series.

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 on Terradue Cloud Platform, we feel just at the beginning of an exciting way of doing research work.