This page provides some considerations and recommendation on the tenancy management. There are no one correct answer but rather things to consider for each specific situation.

Tenant admins

VM Updates

  1. Keep Your VMs Up to Date
    Regularly update your virtual machines (VMs) to ensure they have the latest security patches and performance improvements. This helps protect against vulnerabilities and enhances overall system stability.

  2. Turning On/Off Automatic Updates 
    By default, EWC Ubuntu VMs have automatic security updates turned on to ensure the installation of security patches. While you can disable the automatic updates it's recommended to keep them on. In all cases, make sure to monitor the installation of the critical updates. 

  3. Private IPs and Security Groups 
    Assign only private IP addresses to VMs where public access is not required. This minimises exposure to potential threats. Additionally, configure security groups to open only the necessary ports, reducing the attack surface and enhancing security.

  4. Follow Security Guidelines 
    Adhere to the security guidelines provided (to be published). These guidelines will offer comprehensive advice on maintaining a secure and resilient VM environment.

Deployment

  1. Infrastructure as Code 
    Implement infrastructure as code practices to manage and provision your deployment environments. This ensures consistency and allows you to reproduce environments easily, reducing the risk of configuration drift.

  2. Log Management 
    Keep detailed logs of your deployment processes and system activities. Logs are crucial for troubleshooting issues, monitoring system performance, and maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements.

Backups

  1. Data backup
    In order to keep the data safe, especially the most critical ones, it is a good practice to make them redundant and store them in multiple places, also leveraging the different storage solutions provided by EWC. As examples: data could be synced across multiple volumes attached to different VMs; data could be also saved on the object storage in S3 buckets; where needed it is also possible to replicate on multiple clouds within EWC (e.g. at both ECMWF and EUMETSAT clouds); finally a copy of the data could also be stored externally to EWC, e.g. in local premises or other infrastructure providers. 
  2. Applications backup
    When it is required to have a resilient and faults tolerant application, it is usually chosen a design and deployment that allows to run it in a high availability mode so that if an instance is down, the overall service is not impacted and the application remains available to the end users. In other cases, where it is not possible to implement an active high availability setup, it is at least advisable to take a regular backup of the application and relevant data in order to make it possible a quick service restoration in case of outage or redeployment.   
  3. Virtual Machines backup
    Beside the above mentioned backups, the users of the EWC has the possibility to take a backup of the deployed Virtual Machines by following the steps described in VM Backups in Morpheus .
    However the VM backup is just an additional complementary tool to create a backup, but it shall not be the primary and neither the only one to rely on. It is indeed meant to be used in conjunction with data/application backups and automated deployment.

Resource management

  1. Delete unused VMs
    Regularly review your Virtual Machines, and delete unused ones. Note that switched off VMs will still be counted, in both your quota and your consumption. If a VM is only needed for a fixed period of time, set a reminder to delete it.
  2. Keep eye on budget vs. consumption
    Regularly look at your EWC Accounting Dashboard to ensure you're spending your allowance at the right speed. Your resource allowance is per year and is not a hard limit, so it's fine to spend more one month and less the next month. 
  3. Be aware of your quotas
    The quotas on the other hand are technical limits, so they will block you from using more resource. They are default limits for the number of VMs, the amount of RAM, etc. But they are primarily implemented to prevent you from using too much by mistake. Ask support to increase a quota if you need it.

Communications

User management

Computing Representatives

Tenancy division models

Typically there are two models to handle division of resources:


Description
one tenancy for the whole Member State

Member State will have one tenancy for all users/projects.

Tenant admins need to handle the division of resources and access inside the tenancy using user management tools.

specific tenancies for each use case

Different tenancies for different users/projects.

Users have to identify the number of resources required. Comp.repr needs approve different projects/resources.

Note: The model selected can be modified under request.


Resource management

User management

Communications