An AI-based approach for provider selection in the INDIGO PaaS Orchestration System of the INFN Cloud

¹ INFN-CNAF, Viale Berti Pichat 6/2, 40127 Bologna, Italy
² INFN Sezione di Bari, Via Giovanni Amendola 173, 70126 Bari, Italy
³ ECMWF, Tecnopolo di Bologna, Via Stalingrado 84/3, 40128 Bologna, Italy

^* e-mail: luca.giommi@cnaf.infn.it

Published online: 7 October 2025

Abstract

The National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) has recently launched the INFN Cloud initiative, aimed at providing a federated Cloud infrastructure and a dynamic portfolio of services to scientific communities supported by the Institute. The federative middleware of the INFN Cloud is based on the INDIGO PaaS Orchestration system, consisting of interconnected opensource microservices. Among these, the INDIGO PaaS Orchestrator receives high-level deployment requests in the form of TOSCA templates and coordinates the process of creating deployments on the IaaS platforms made available by the federated providers.

Through the support of national and European initiatives like Terabit, inter-Twin, and AI4EOSC, INFN is working to enhance the orchestration system by integrating Artificial Intelligence to optimize deployment scheduling. This contribution outlines the preparatory work to identify the key features and their sources (e.g., databases, logs, monitoring tools), followed by the data preprocessing needed for in-depth analysis of different AI techniques. The first implemented approach involves the design of two models: one for the deployment success/failure classification and another for the creation/failure time regression. The combination of the output of the two models trained on recent and sliding time windows aims to define an ordered list of providers that the Orchestrator can use for deployment submission.