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The EGI Cloud Compute service offers a multi-cloud IaaS federation that brings together research clouds as a scalable computing platform for research accessible with OpenID Connect Federated Identity. The federation is not limited to single sign-on, it also introduces features to facilitate the portability of applications across providers: i) a common VM image catalogue VM image replication to ensure these images will be available at providers whenever needed; ii) a GraphQL information discovery API to understand the capacities and capabilities available at each provider; and iii) integration with orchestration tools (such as Infrastructure Manager) to abstract the federation and facilitate using heterogeneous providers. EGI also monitors the correct function of every provider and collects usage information across all the infrastructure. DODAS (Dynamic On Demand Analysis Service) is an open-source Platform-as-a-Service tool, which allows to deploy software applications over heterogeneous and hybrid clouds. DODAS is one of the so-called Thematic Services of the EOSC-hub project and it instantiates on-demand container-based clusters offering a high level of abstraction to users, allowing to exploit distributed cloud infrastructures with a very limited knowledge of the underlying technologies.This work presents a comprehensive overview of DODAS integration with EGI Cloud Federation, reporting the experience of the integration with CMS Experiment submission infrastructure system.

The EGI Federated Cloud is a standards-based, open cloud system as well as its enabling technologies that federates institutional clouds to offer a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute driven applications and services. The EGI Federated Cloud is based on open standards and open source Cloud Management Frameworks and offers to its users IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities and interfaces tuned towards the needs of users in research and education. The federation enables scientific data, workloads, simulations and services to span across multiple administrative locations, allowing researchers and educators to access and exploit the distributed resources as an integrated system. The EGI Federated Cloud collaboration established a user support model and a training infrastructure to raise visibility of this service within European scientific communities with the overarching goal to increase adoption and, ultimately increase the usage of e-infrastructures for the benefit of the whole European Research Area. The paper describes this scalable user support and training infrastructure models. The training infrastructure is built on top of the production sites to reduce costs and increase its sustainability. Appropriate design solutions were implemented to reduce the security risks due to the cohabitation of production and training resources on the same sites. The EGI Federated Cloud educational program foresees different kind of training events from basic tutorials to spread the knowledge of this new infrastructure to events devoted to specific scientific disciplines teaching how to use tools already integrated in the infrastructure with the assistance of experts identified in the EGI community. The main success metric of this educational program is the number of researchers willing to try the Federated Cloud, which are steered into the EGI world by the EGI Federated Cloud Support Team through a formal process that brings them from the initial tests to fully exploit the production resources. © 2015 IEEE.