Taking Advantage of Cloud Solutions to Balance Requests in an Astrophysical Data Center

Abstract

A complete astrophysical publishing environment, working as a helper system for an astrophysical data center, requires various components, from custom data back ends up to more or less standardized (e.g. Virtual Observatory driven) front end solutions. Combining this environment into one framework can lead to a potentially non scalable or hardly improvable system. In this contribution we describe what we are planning and developing to take advantage of cloud computing infrastructures and of a modular/distributed component architecture to provide a scalable and maintainable publishing environment at the Italian center for Astronomical Archives (IA2) at the INAF (Italian National Institute for Astrophysics) Astronomical Observatory of Trieste. Using a set of modular services, connected by registered interfaces, we are planning to use automated balancing at the front end to allocate services on demand in a cloud environment and allow generic data access in the back end archive solution.