CERNBox: the CERN cloud storage hub
H.G Labrador

Date: July 2018
Publisher: CHEP 2018
Location: Sofia, Bulgaria
Links: PDF


Abstract

CERNBox is the CERN cloud storage hub. It allows synchronising and sharing files on all major desktop and mobile platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android, iOS) aiming to provide universal access and offline availability to any data stored in the CERN EOS infrastructure.

With more than 12000 users registered in the system, CERNBox has responded to the high demand in our diverse community to an easily and accessible cloud storage solution that also provides integration with other CERN services for big science: visualisation tools, interactive data analysis and real-time collaborative editing.

Collaborative authoring of documents is now becoming standard practice with public cloud services, and within CERNBox we are looking into several options: from the collaborative editing of shared office documents with different solutions (Microsoft, OnlyOffice, Collabora) to integrating mark-down as well as LaTeX editors, to exploring the evolution of Jupyter Notebooks towards collaborative editing, where the latter leverages on the existing SWAN Physics analysis service.

We report on our experience managing this technology and applicable use-cases, also in a broader scientific and research context and its future evolution with highlights on the current development status and future roadmap. In particular we will highlight the future move to an architecture based on microservices to easily adapt and evolve the service to the technology and usage evolution, notably to unify CERN home directory services.