Service Maintenance Agreement

These regulations govern the use of the information processing infrastructure of the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), comprising the data processing and storage equipment, communications systems, and other facilities for computer-aided information processing which MPCDF is in charge of.

§ 1 Object of Concern

(1) You have been given administrative access to a virtual machine or other service hosted at the MPCDF. In order to be able to (continue to) host this system for you, we need you to agree to maintain it, for the duration of its service life.

(2) Upon creation, by request of an MPCDF user or a group of cooperating users, we will list those as maintainers for that service. All maintainers will get administrative access to manage the service on their own and under their responsibility. The list of maintainers can later be changed, upon request by any of the existing maintainers of the service.

§ 2 Maintenance Duties

(1) The MPCDF will provide an initial configuration of the service and provide you with the means to access and configure it. From then on, ensuring the safe operation of the system becomes your responsibility. We want to explicitly mention that this entails

1. ensuring the used software is maintained with security updates by the vendors and is not out of its service life
2. regular and timely application of all applicable security updates
3. ensuring that no one not explicitly authorized to do so can access and/or tamper with the service or its data
4. complying with all applicable legal requirements, especially regarding data protection and copyright laws, as well as the stipulations of the general MPCDF terms of use.

This list is of course not meant to be exhaustive, there can be numerous other necessary actions to ensure the proper and safe operation, potentially very specific for the details of the service you want to operate.

(2) The MPCDF will ensure as best as possible that the service stays active, and - in the case of a potential actual outage of our hosting infrastructure - power-up the system again as soon as feasible. Note that we do not give an explicit availability guarantee.

(3) For cooperatively operating the service within the MPCDF environment, maintainers are also required to

1. ensure that the operation of the service does not impair the proper operation of the MPCDF infrastructure and other hosted services
2. ensure that MPCDF staff has administrative access to the service at all times, in order to track abuse and investigate potential issues
3. keep an active MPCDF user account and have the stored information there up to date, especially contact details
4. notify MPCDF immediately in case the service is no longer needed
5. notify and potentially name a replacement maintainer immediately, in case you can not or do no longer want to maintain the service

(4) Failure to observe any of the listed points or other (in-)actions that endanger the safety and security and/or proper operations of the MPCDF infrastructure or other third-parties can result in a temporary or permanent suspension of the service.

(5) We will periodically ask you (and potential other listed maintainers of the service) if you are still willing to continue to maintain it. In case you decline or we do not get a timely reply, we have to remove you from the list of active maintainers. If there are no active maintainers left for a particular service, MPCDF has to take it out of operation.

(6) By default, there is no automatic backup of self-administered services in place. We require the maintainers to take care themselves that their stored data in the service is properly backed up, in case they deem this is necessary. In case you use the existing MPCDF backup facilities via an individual agreement with the Backup&Archive team, it is subsequently then your responsibility to continuously monitor the success of the backup process.