The glideinWMS Approach to the Ownership of System Images in the Cloud World

Scientific communities that are accustomed to use Grid resources are now considering the use of Cloud resources. However, moving from the Grid to the Cloud brings along the need for the creation and maintenance of the system image used to configure the provisioned resources, and this presents both opportunities and problems for the users. The impact is especially interesting in the context of glideinWMS due to its layered architecture. This paper describes the various options available to the glideinWMS project team, their advantages and disadvantages, and explains why one of them is to be preferred.