Elastic Secure Infrastructure

Read the November 2022 ESI update: OpenShift on elastic secure bare metal infrastructure

Today many organizations choose to host their physically deployed clusters outside of the cloud for security, price or performance reasons. Such organizations form a large section of the economy, including financial companies, medical institutions and government agencies. Organizations host these clusters in their private data-centers or rent a colocation facility. Clusters are typically created with enough capacity to service peak demand, resulting in silos of under-utilized hardware. Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI) is a platform, created at the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), that enables physically deployed clusters to break these silos. It enables rapid multiplexing of bare-metal servers between clusters with different security requirements. The RUCS scheduler and FLOCX marketplace software are important components of ESI described in the ESI overview presentation. This project encompasses work in several areas to design, build and evaluate secure bare-metal elastic infrastructure for data centers. Additional research focuses on market-based models for resource allocation.

Learn More

• The ESI team has made several contributions to and actively used Keylime, which was awarded an FLC Excellence in Technology Transfer Award in 2021 (read more).
• See an overview of ESI in slides and presentation video from the 2020 Open Cloud Workshop.
• See the latest software developments and a demonstration in How I Learned to Share my Hardware (with ESI) from DevConf.US 2020.

• Multi-Tenant Ironic slides from an ESI BoF discussion at the 2020 Open Cloud Workshop provide details on changes being made to the open source Ironic project to support ESI as of March 2020. Check the Ironic repository for the current state of the changes.
• This project is developed on the Mass Open Cloud.