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Nimbus Best practices

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Using Nimbus Cloud has many benefits.  It is flexible and scalable to your research needs.  You are able to access it whenever you wish, with no waiting in queues and you have total control over your instances to install and run whatever you want.  However with great power, comes great responsibility.  Below are a list of best practices you should undertake when using Nimbus:

  1. Back-up any critical data to an off-site location.  Storage in Nimbus is not backed up, so we strongly recommend keeping a back-up copy of important data.
  2. Nimbus gives access to two types of storage by default; Root Volume (location of home directory, and storage for the operating system of your instance) and Data Volume (a second, independent volume you can attach to your instance for working storage).  We strongly recommend using your data volume to store your input and output data, so you are not using up your root volume space on your instance.  For further details on attaching a data volume to your instance visit here. 

  3. Keep up-to-date with security patches, bug fixes and application upgrades.  For example, updates on Ubuntu are managed via the apt application.   sudo apt update  is the command that updates the local database of available software packages for Ubuntu.   For further details on how to update your instance(s) visit here. 

  4. Security groups.  Only open ports that you actually need to run your software, for instructions on adding security groups visit here.
  5. Snapshots save your Root Disk and allows you to launch a fully configured instance with all packages already installed if something happens to your instance.  Their main purpose is to save the state of your instance before you perform a big change or update, so you can roll back if there are issues.  You can snapshot storage volumes but are not intended for backing up data (refer to point 1 regarding backing up data).  Further information visit Use Snapshots. 
  6. Make sure to re-apply and respond to renewal emails.  As per the conditions of use, Nimbus allocations are for 6 months.  Instance(s) will be locked after the allocation has expired and then data and instance(s) will be deleted from Nimbus following a one month grace period.
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