Design and implementation of lifecycle management of the CyberShuttle agents

Apache Airavata MFT is a distributed high-performance, multi-protocol data transfer engine to orchestrate data movement and operations across most cloud and on-premises storages. Agent is the core of this distributed system which does the heavy lifting of transfer jobs. Right now, agents have to be manually deploy and configure to start the transfer. This is a problem for researchers and people who need to transfer data without having much technical skills or time. Updated Proposal Summary: Updated proposal includes creating a desktop application and cybershuttle server to orchestrate the lifecycle management. This will guide cybershuttle agent and MFT agent from cybershuttle server to perform execution of jobs and data transfer, this would also maintain the lifecycle of cybershuttle agent and mft agents. This would help deploy any software and not limited to MFT agents. The proposed solution is to automate the process of deploying and lifecycle management of the agents when a transfer job is submitted from an edge machine. This will help various researchers and people who needs to transfer data from a source to a destination without having much technical skills or time. The deliverables are a piece of code to deploy the agent on various virtual machines, a piece of code to maintain the agent's lifecycle, an automated process for deployment and management, onboarding users and evaluating edge cases, and automated agent placement. The benefits of the proposed solution are that it will make it easy and on the go solution for people even with less technical ability to use the vast speeds and advantages MFT offers. It will save time and effort for researchers and people who need to transfer data from a source to destination. It will make the MFT more user-friendly and accessible to a wider range of people. It not just stops at MFT, in fact users can deploy any containerizable applications using this solution.