The goal of the histHub project, currently under construction, is to develop a platform for networked and standardised data for historical sciences in Switzerland. The platform will enable users to search numerous databases on Swiss history, integrating historical data into the workflows (research, data processing and production, evaluation) of interested target groups, and as such, will become a contact point for the research community in the digital humanities. For security and privacy reasons, it is essential that the deployment of this portal is on Swiss-based cloud infrastructure.

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In the first stage of this project, a feasibility study was carried out about porting a prototype histHub portal deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to a Swiss cloud provider. This required understanding the needs of histHub, in terms of cloud resources and software environments. The COCA-PT tool was used to calculate and compare the costs of various Swiss cloud providers. In addition, account migration and maintenance costs were also factored in, as well as the availability of tools (e.g. container management system) for each cloud provider, and the cost of deploying and maintaining any missing required features.

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The second stage of the project identified and implemented tools and services to replace those used in the AWS solution, in order for histHub to be deployed on Swiss cloud infrastructure with the same functionality. A development instance of the platform was then deployed on the hepiaCloud as a proof of concept, and extensively tested to ensure the platform offered the same performance as the previous AWS solution. In addition, Ansible PlayBooks were written to allow portability between various cloud infrastructure, and a detailed plan was developed with a view to final implementation and user training on a commercial Swiss cloud provider.