Entitlements in bwCloud-OS

⚠️ Please Note: The entitlement model is currently in the process of restructuring, and the information on this page may be outdated.

Entitlements in bwCloud-OS define who can access the platform, how many resources they may use, and under what conditions. They are issued and managed by the user’s home institution and play a central role in how bwCloud-OS is used and funded.

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Access Control via Entitlements

Entitlements determine whether a user is allowed to access bwCloud-OS at all. This decision is made exclusively by the user's home institution.

• Since 01.10.2019, the following rule applies:

  No entitlement from the home institution = No access to bwCloud(-OS)

  The bwCloud-OS team has no authority to grant access without an official entitlement.

Faster, Automated Registration

Registration is streamlined through entitlement:

• The entitlement are automatically evaluated during registration.
• Users receive immediate access once their entitlement is confirmed — no manual activation required.

Current Entitlement Types

There are currently two types of entitlements:

• bwCloud-Basic Aimed at students and beginner users, offering limited, free resources. This entitlement is meant for use cases such as:
  • Student coursework
  • Short-lived or experimental servers
  • Hosting simple software repositories
• bwCloud-Extended Intended for advanced or long-term users who require more resources. This entitlement allows full access to available instance flavors and will incur costs in the future. This entitlement is meant for
  • Operational workloads
  • Research
  • Teaching infrastructur

📌 A user account can have both entitlements — in that case, bwCloud-Extended takes precedence.

Resource Usage and Flavor Access

Entitlements determine which flavor types (resource profiles) a user can launch:

• bwCloud-Basic
  • Only allows launching nano or tiny instances.
  • These instances are free of charge .
• bwCloud-Extended
  • Grants access to all available flavors.
  • Users receive significantly higher quotas.
  • Usage will be billed in the future via institutional cost models.

VM Lifespan and Cleanup Policy

To ensure fair resource distribution and system availability, different rules apply depending on the assigned entitlement:

• bwCloud-Basic
  • VMs may be regularly deleted by the bwCloud team to:
    • Clean up unused instances
    • Free capacity for new users
  • Expect VMs to be temporary and potentially removed without notice.
• bwCloud-Extended
  • No such restrictions apply.
  • VMs are persistent and remain active until the user deletes them.

Cost Allocation and Funding Model

Entitlements also help define who is financially responsible for resource usage. To ensure sustainable operation and future hardware/software upgrades, bwCloud-OS is moving toward a cost allocation model.

• The user’s institution is responsible for:
  • Verifying users have access to funding.
  • Covering the collective costs for all users from that institution.
• bwCloud-OS will generate aggregated usage reports and invoices per institution — no individual billing.