New Features on SURF Research Cloud

In 2024 (so far)

Attach/Detach Storage (on an existing workspace)

Moving around persistent storage volumes between workspaces was tedious, before. If your workspace is from March '24 or later, you can just pause the workspace and manage the attached storages in the "Storage" tab of the extended workspace display in the portal. Read more in the user wiki.

Mount Storage Volumes by Name

Persistent storage volumes used to be mounted under "~/data/volume_x". The number "x" was randomly assigened so you had to guess which volume was which, if you had more than one attached. Now, by default, volumes are mounted by their given storage name. If your catalog item still needs the legacy naming pattern of "volume_x", you can set a special parameter. Read more in the user wiki.

Flexible Security Groups (open ports)

Opening ports required you to think ahead a lot, before creating the workspace. Now - depending on the catalog item you use - you can add security group rules that will open specific ports or port ranges. Read more in the user wiki.

Versioning in Component Creation

If you are maintaining a catalog item on Research Cloud, you want to make sure that it keeps working for your end users while you are working on improvements. While the Ansible Playbooks, Docker files or powershell scripts can be version-controlled in git, the remainder of a component with all it's fields was not really versionable.

Now you can take your component through an actual Dev/Test/Production cycle, too. Read more in the user wiki.

September 2023

Access Jupyter Notebooks with SRAM

If you start a Jupyter Notebook workspace using a SURF Research Cloud catalog item, you will log in to the workspace with SRAM.

This is the same mechanism that is used for logging in to the SURF Research Cloud portal.

Just select your institute (or EduID) and log in.