Globus Nexus: A Platform-as-a-Service provider of research identity, profile, and group management

•Globus Nexus provides hosted identity, profile and group management capabilities.•Globus Nexus is used by thousands of researchers across the world.•We describe seven applications that leverage Globus Nexus as a platform.•Our cloud-based deployment model provides high reliability and availability.•We show that Globus Nexus can scale well beyond our current requirements.

Globus Nexus is a professionally hosted Platform-as-a-Service that provides identity, profile and group management functionality for the research community. Many collaborative e-Science applications need to manage large numbers of user identities, profiles, and groups. However, developing and maintaining such capabilities is often challenging given the complexity of modern security protocols and requirements for scalable, robust, and highly available implementations. By outsourcing this functionality to Globus Nexus, developers can leverage best-practice implementations without incurring development and operations overhead. Users benefit from enhanced capabilities such as identity federation, flexible profile management, and user-oriented group management. In this paper we present Globus Nexus, describe its capabilities and architecture, summarize how several e-Science applications leverage these capabilities, and present results that characterize its scalability, reliability, and availability.