Speaker
Description
After nearly five years of development, the NFDI as a whole, along with its participating consortia and services, has reached a level of maturity that now calls for sustainable service design. A key example of this evolution is the progress made in the area of Authentication (ensuring the identity of users accessing resources) and Authorization (controlling which users may access specific resources). Within the Base4NFDI framework , this has been advanced through the IAM4NFDI service. The solutions build on existing Community Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures (CAAI), reflecting the growing collaboration among the NFDI consortia. To further integrate services across providers, establish a foundation for offering and accessing services, and enable the long-term development of specialized providers, we require an overview of individual resource consumption.
This sparked the idea of complementing IAM4NFDI with work on accounting. The latter refers to the logging of resource usage within a federation and has ties to Authentication and Authorization—completing the "AAA" framework (with Accounting as the third A).
Our key motivations for introducing federated accounting include:
- Fostering cross-consortia cooperation in service provisioning,
- Avoiding over reliance on commercial hyperscalers,
- Enabling cost recovery, fair resource allocation, and usage transparency,
- Creating the foundation for a flexible and sustainable service marketplace.
Accounting is already a topic of interest in several contexts, including EOSC Future and EOSC EU Nodes, AARC, bwCloud, Helmholtz (HiFIS) frameworks and initiatives.
Coordination within NFDI is crucial to prevent fragmentation and overhead, and to ensure that smaller user groups can easily access essential resources backed by core funding. Therefore, a working group has been formed to evaluate current solutions and aims to propose and implement a federated, NFDI-wide accounting solution as part of a Base4NFDI project. The recent DFG call for storage systems also highlights the necessity of a coordinated and overarching concept for accounting within the NFDI.
