Hi, there. I’m curious about the limited functionality of the hosted instances/nodes in an aim to balance expectations and testing. I’m aiming to get some confirmation on limited functionality since we are presently not able to create environments of any kind. As a part of our testing, we were planning on emulating disk images of an author’s personal computer, for example, but in order to do this we have to make it a base environment(re: the documentation), which we can’t do. Will this functionality open up at some point during the pilot or will this remain off the table for the duration of the pilot?
Thank you!
Hi @monique_lassere! Apologies for the delayed response here, but I was out of the office last week, and wanted to clarify the current thinking and work schedule with the dev team before I responded.
At the moment, priorities for development in July are:
- continued “invisible”/structural improvements on user management and access control for resources and Environments, which enables…
- …sharing environments via link, and a “viewer”/guest permission level, so that specified users can just see and run a given Environments without seeing all the rest of the EaaSI interface
- cleaning up the deployment process so that orgs running their own instance of EaaSI (rather than relying on the hosted service) can catch up and get on the same page as all of us with functionality and workflows
Following (and probably simultaneously to some degree) completion of those goals, dev work will prioritize first the “new” Environment configuration workflow (e.g. creating an Environment from “scratch” with an operating system installer) then file/system disk image import - which would (re-)enable the use case you describe, importing existing VMs or bootable disk images.
That is all to answer your question that yes: we expect the functionality you describe to become available during the pilot period, though I can not yet provide a very specific timetable on when that would become available in the hosted service. I provide all the above for context - that is, we would expect work to begin on implementing this functionality by the end of July, with a completion goal TBD depending on capacity.
It appears safe to say that image import will be available in the hosted service in the fall, but we will continue to provide updates on dev progress. We may also be able to help you with this use case on a one-off basis, before the workflow is properly fleshed out in the hosted service, again just depending on capacity. Let me know if you have any particular deadlines or thoughts on a particular date you would want to test that author’s personal computer by, and we can try to accommodate! And let me know if you have any follow-up questions here.
Hey Ethan, no worries at all and thanks so much for your response. The context is super useful. This particular use case isn’t a super high priority for us but was one we outlined initially. I’d say there’s no need at the moment to work through this on a one-off basis at the moment as we work through other use cases but if this changes I can let you know. Thanks again!
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@monique_lassere, I just wanted to follow up here - is there any possibility you would be able to share one of the disk images you have in mind for this workflow with me/us privately for testing purposes? I’m gathering up examples to run through the new workflow and the more we can just use “real-world” examples, the better; and I may be able to use it to get an environment going for (or with) you in the meantime
totally understood if that’s not possible due to access restrictions, but wanted to offer - it would not get uploaded to the hosted service directly or to any public EaaSI instance, happy to discuss more
Hi, sorry, I just saw this. Yes, I can. How do you want me to send it to you?
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No problem at all - whatever is convenient or secure for you! Yale’s got a secure file share service (FileLocker) with a 10GB file size limit; I can send an upload request to your Harvard email. Otherwise, I also have enterprise-level Google Drive, Box, and Office 365/OneDrive accounts, not sure what your options are. WeTransfer also an option if it can fit in the 2GB-level free tier?
Hi, @monique_lassere and @ethan.gates . I’m replying to this thread because I was just talking to a colleague here about using EaaSI for their research results replication service, and that would require us to create our own base environments as well. I’m eager to hear more about updates regarding that feature in the pilot, and can offer help (e.g., describing a use case, etc) in whatever way works best.
Hi, @ethan.gates Ethan, I’m so sorry for the late reply. How many disk images would you like? I have enterprise-level Google Drive and Office 365/OneDrive as well, so either those or FileLocker, depending on how many you would like! Thank you.