[Discuss] Globus retirement considerations in WLCG

[Maarten Litmaath]

Dear Grid Community Forum,
in the WLCG Management Board meeting of March 17 there was a discussion about
a possible retirement timeline for the remaining WLCG dependencies on Globus:

    https://indico.cern.ch/event/870359/#9-globus-retirement-planning

Prompted by the plans and timelines that already exist in OSG:

    https://opensciencegrid.org/technology/policy/gridftp-gsi-migration/

For WLCG, removing the dependency on GridFTP is being tackled in the TPC WG
of the DOMA project:

    https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LCG/ThirdPartyCopy

Currently, GridFTP is also being used for job submissions to CREAM instances,
which should all be gone by the end of this year, and ARC CE instances,
which already support HTTPS as an alternative.

While it looks viable for WLCG not to depend on GridFTP by the end of 2021,
can we actually remove Globus as a build dependency from the various storage
service implementations (which ones?) that currently make use of it?

Also taking into account that other communities may be unable to replace
X509 certificates with tokens as "quickly" as WLCG hopes to do, implying
there may need to remain code in the affected implementations that is able
to deal with X509 somehow?

Next we come to GSI.  Besides its use in conjunction with GridFTP and SRM,
WLCG has a critical dependency on it through MyProxy!  For as long as we
need the latter, I suspect it would not be a big deal to support GSI in
addition, but it would be nicer if MyProxy were made independent of it...

Next we come to the Grid CF build infrastructure: what would be the plan
for when it can no longer make use of OSG effort or resources?

What are your thoughts about these matters?  Was anything missed?  Thanks!