Exosphere: the User-Friendliest Interface for Non-proprietary Cloud Infrastructure

Empowers researchers and other non-IT professionals to deploy code and run services on OpenStack-based cloud systems, without advanced virtualization or networking knowledge
Fills the gap between OpenStack interfaces built for system administrators (like Horizon), and intuitive-but-proprietary services like DigitalOcean and Amazon Lightsail
Enables cloud operators to deliver a friendly, powerful interface to their community with customized branding, nomenclature, and single sign-on integration

Try Exosphere

Visit try.exosphere.app if you have access to an existing OpenStack cloud with internet-facing APIs
Use jetstream2.exosphere.app if you have an allocation on Jetstream2
Run Exosphere locally if you don't want to use our hosted site

Overview and Features

Wait, what is OpenStack? OpenStack is the operating system and APIs that power public research clouds like Jetstream2 and Chameleon, private clouds at organizations like Wikimedia and CERN, and public commercial clouds like OVH, Fuga, Vexxhost, and Leafcloud. Any organization can run OpenStack on its own hardware to provide a cloud service for its own community, or for the world.

What can I do with Exosphere?

Create instances to run your code, and volumes to manage your data
- Works great for containers, intensive compute jobs, disposable experiments, and persistent web services
Get one-click, browser-based shell and graphical desktop access to cloud instances (via Apache Guacamole)
Pretty graphs show an instance's resource usage at a glance
If you're a cloud operator, deliver a customized interface with white-labeling, localization, and single sign-on
100% self-hostable, 99% standalone client application
- Two small proxy servers secure web browser connections to OpenStack APIs, and interactive services running on cloud instances
On the roadmap:
- First-class support for container and data science workbench resources
- Cluster orchestration
- Community-curated deployment automations for scientific workflows and custom services
Free, open source, and open development process -- come hack with us!
- See Exosphere's values and goals

Documentation Index

For Users and Anyone Else

Running Exosphere yourself (instead of using one of the hosted sites)
Exosphere Compatibility (with clouds and instance operating systems)
Values and Goals of the Exosphere Project
Nomenclature Reference
Installing Exosphere Progressive Web Application
Cockpit Deprecation and Manual Installation

For Cloud Operators

For Exosphere Contributors

For Exosphere Project Maintainers

Legal Docs

Collaborate With Us

Talk to us in real-time on Matrix / Element - #exosphere:matrix.org. You can also browse an archive of the chat history.

There's also a developer-focused Matrix / Element - #exosphere-dev:matrix.org chat with a browsable archive.

We use GitLab to track issues and contributions. To request a new feature or report a bug, create a new issue on our GitLab project.

We have a weekly community video call Wednesdays at 15:30 UTC (note the new day and time). Join by clicking on the Jitsi widget in our Element chat. (agenda, and previous meeting notes)

Exosphere's Impact

Jetstream2, a science and engineering research cloud, offers Exosphere as its primary user interface. Jetstream2 is available to any US-based researcher.
Exosphere has a $298k award from the US National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems. Read about it in this news release.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2229642. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.