Participants

Agenda

Agenda Overview

Recording Notice

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Approval of minutes from the previous WG meeting

Actions

EOSC EU Node AAI Update II

Projects, Credits and Accounting (from the AAI Perspective)

• Personal and Group Projects on the EOSC EU Node
• Authorisation for EOSC EU Node Services

Project-Based Structure for Authorization and Accounting

• The EOSC EU Node uses a project-based structure for authorisation and accounting, where users are assigned personal projects upon joining.
• Faculty members have the ability to create group projects and invite collaborators, with projects serving as the basis for accounting and resource allocation.
• Each project is identified by a unique identifier (UUID) and can be given a user-defined name. The UUID for the personal projects is prefixed with 'pp') and for group projects it is prefixed with 'gp'.
• Personal projects cannot have subgroups, while group projects may have. all projects contain metadata. One the AAI side all projects have the following metadata:
• Unique ID (UUID)
• Display Name
• Start date
• End date
• User membership
• Owner role
• Member role

Credit-Based System for Resource Allocation

• The EOSC node implements a credit-based system where staff/employees receive 100 credits by default, enabling access to application services like Jupiter notebooks and file management.
• Faculty members are allocated 500 credits, allowing access to infrastructure services such as virtual machines and containers, while group projects can receive 1000 credits.
• Credits are refreshed on a monthly basis, and users can request additional credits or special projects through a ticketing system, aiming to provide easy initial usage and accommodate advanced requests.

Authorization Implementation

• Authorisation in the EOSC node encompasses user information, project membership, and credit allocation.
• The portal manages project creation and credit assignment. Projects are managed on the AAI utilising the SCIM API, while credits are managed by a separate credit management system outside of the AAI.
• The EOSC EU Node AAI uses AARC-G069 to signal project membership. AARC-G069 entitlements are transferred during user authentication or when service to service access is happening, the protected services are using token introspection.
• Some services require that information about projects is  pre-provisioned.

Integration of Commercial Services

• Integrating commercial services posed challenges due to limitations in supporting custom attributes or claims, leading to the introduction of a simplified 'EU node project claim' containing only the project identifier.
• The system extensively employs service-to-service access using client credential flow for backend operations, addressing these integration issues.

User Interaction with the System

• The authorization and accounting system remains largely invisible to end-users, who interact with a portal interface to allocate their credits to various services.
• The system is designed to be elastic, accounting for usage after the fact rather than imposing hard limits, notifying users if they exceed their allocated resources without immediate blocking.
• Ongoing efforts aim to improve clarity around the access policy and expand FAQs to address user questions about credit management and project persistence.

Affiliation-Based Access Policy

• The EOSC EU node's affiliation-based access policy determines the user's level based on institutional roles (e.g., faculty vs. staff)..
• There is a need for better documentation or clearer guidelines on interpreting and validating affiliations to ensure consistent application of this policy.

Future Discussion and Improvement Areas

• Identified areas for future discussion include cross-node access and interoperability, refining the affiliation-based access policy, improving user documentation and interfaces for credit management, and addressing potential workarounds like creating new projects to bypass credit limits.
• Additional topics involve exploring how to encode accounting information in authentication assertions, balancing technical requirements with user experience, and ease of use.
• The group plans to review documents in detail and provide feedback for future meetings, transitioning from information sharing to collaborative improvement of the EOSC node AI architecture.

Cross Node Access - EOSC AAI Federation

• Did not have time for this topic

AOB

The presentations given during the EOSC Symposium are now online here: https://eosc.eu/eosc-symposium-2024-outcomes-and-resources/