[Fiware-creatifi-coaching] [CreatiFI Helsinki Hub] General Support #205: Which FI-Lab region to use?

[Xavier Carol Rossell]

Hi,

A CreatiFI applicant is asking for help on which region to use and how to
take that decision. There was an earlier question/answer interaction.

Here it is his first question:

"Regarding CreatiFI project, is there a particular region or regions that I
should use? And if so, why so?

If not, what are the considerations that I should apply when choosing a
region (as moving from one region to another later would require
reconfiguring SGs, keypairs etc.)?

I have not found a clear guide from FI-Lab or other material supporting
this decision. The most clear instructions so far I've seen is the warning
shown when logging into fi-lab cloud portal: "We are expanding the Spanish
node with temporary resources. Please be aware that after 2 weeks we will
remove all the virtual machines, IP addresses, storage, etc. provisioned
these days". This suggest that "Spanish node" (is that Spain or Spain2
region or both?) is not a good choice right now.

However based on my testing I've found out that:

- Most regions have only one floating IP available. This is not sufficient
for ICI-e architecture which needs multiple public IP addresses.
- Those regions that have a higher quota of floating IP addresses don't
actually have any of them available (failure during allocation)
- Stockholm region is otherwise interesting, but it has bandwidth
throttling in effect (limiting instance public network throughput to about
12 kb/s)

I can finish MTE testing with Spain region, but for future reference I'd
really need working infrastructure with enough IP addresses that isn't
going to go away randomly (like Spain supposedly is going to happen)."

And this is the answer we gave him:

"FIWARE is a federated community, the nodes of the FIWARE Laboratory are
provided by autonomous organizations that offer their resources without
compensation to the FIWARE community, and therefore there is no restriction
on its usage neither on its duties.

FIWARE Lab is an experimental laboratory offered to the FIWARE accelerator
programs to provide resources for free for the applicants to test their
developments in a fair way. But it doesn't entail an agreement on resources
availability or systems up time as a production environments do.

If you think that FILab is not a valid platform for the development of your
project, you'll have to prove it by action. It means that you have to open
tickets for specific issues you find and that those issues hasn't been
solved and therefore blocked the progress of your project development.
Although we are aware of that kind of problems you mention, a generic issue
like this one is not valid to be taken as a proven usage of the FILab
platform."

He considers that it doesn't answer his questions and he decided to open a
new ticket that I copy here:

"Regarding CreatiFI project, is there a particular region or regions that I
should use? And if so, why so?

If not, what are the considerations that I should apply when choosing a
region (as moving from one region to another later would require
reconfiguring SGs, keypairs etc.)?

I have not found a clear guide from FI-Lab or other material supporting
this decision. The most clear instructions so far I've seen is the warning
shown when logging into fi-lab cloud portal: "We are expanding the Spanish
node with temporary resources. Please be aware that after 2 weeks we will
remove all the virtual machines, IP addresses, storage, etc. provisioned
these days". This suggest that "Spanish node" (is that Spain or Spain2
region or both?) is not a good choice right now.

However based on my testing I've found out that:

Most regions have only one floating IP available. This is not sufficient
for ICI-e architecture which needs multiple public IP addresses.
Those regions that have a higher quota of floating IP addresses don't
actually have any of them available (failure during allocation)
Stockholm region is otherwise interesting, but it has bandwidth throttling
in effect (limiting instance public network throughput to about 12 kb/s)
I can finish MTE testing with Spain region, but for future reference I'd
really need working infrastructure with enough IP addresses that isn't
going to go away randomly (like Spain supposedly is going to happen).

This is a copy of #202 because #202 did not resolve and neither did it help
with the two important questions posed:

- What region to use?
- What information is there to make such a decision?

I *did not* say anything about fi-labs suitability and that *is not* a
question I am looking an answer for. I do want either a recommendation for
choosing a region for testing or information that will help with making
that decision."

Could you please give us advice on how to answer these questions?

Thanks in advance.
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