CERNBox

CERNBox is a file sync&share solution used at CERN.

Find more information in the official website.

Software Architecture

The architecture of CERNBox, SWAN, and the underlying EOS storage solution presents the following diagram:

CERNBox, SWAN, and EOS architecture
Source: github.com/sciencebox/kuboxed

 

Deployment

In Up2U, it is deployed in a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster, by applying provided definitions (templates) of K8s objects. These definitions as well as step by step deployment instructions are available here.

In brief, the deployment consists of the following stages:

  1. Preparing the cluster and labelling its nodes for specific purposes
  2. Preparing persistent storage spaces
  3. Deploying the LDAP service for managing user accounts, using template LDAP.yaml
  4. Deploying the EOS storage service, using templates eos-*.yaml
  5. Deploying the actual CERNBox service, using template CERNBox.yaml

Integration with SSO

Example configuration for integrating with SSO via SAML is available here.

Such a configuration can be provided to CERNBox.yaml by setting the following environmental variables for the cernbox container within the cernbox K8s deployment: 

- name: CUSTOMIZATION_REPO
  value: "https://github.com/up2university/CERNBox-customizations.git"
- name: CUSTOMIZATION_COMMIT
  value: "master"
- name: CUSTOMIZATION_SCRIPT
  value: ""