July through September 2008
The last two months of this quarter the DSPS group has been
under new leadership. While work has continued largely unabated,
significant activity has taken place to evaluate what work DSPS
does and how it does it. The group has been re-oriented into
largely 3 teams: Identity Services, Developer Services and the
Applications Management and Integration Team (AMIT). This allows
for a better focus of effort amongst those performing the essential
work of DSPS. A fourth team is emerging in support of various
platforms such as Athena and Mobile but the work here is not fully
defined as is the rest of DSPS.
DSPS has delivered to CCS the necessary programming and infrastructure
in support of the TeamSpaces evaluation and demonstration effort.
Several team members have been involved to make this effort happen
and more time spent than anticipated due to various planning and
technical problems evolving. As interim solution for group
management TeamSpaces has been deployed utilizing the Moira Web
Service developed in-house.
Thalia infrastructure support efforts have been re-evaluated and
more properly scoped to ensure delivery of working and supportable
systems to Thalia as it moves forward. This has involved reasonable
effort in re-defining service readiness for this project. Thalia
will now be able to meet its deadlines from an infrastructure perspective.
The MySQL cluster effort as a general service for all applications
utilizing the "clustering" technology has been abandoned as it is
technically and operationally not feasible - the technology is simply
not mature. As we proceed to get various projects back on track previously
impacted by this effort we will revisit a MySQL DB service, not based
on clustering.
DSPS worked closely with the Software Download Licensing System (SDLS)
project to determine operational feasibility and highlight issues
in the development process to get the project back on track. SDLS
and the IS&T website project are both based on the Drupal application
framework and we continue to collaborate on both the projects and
lend our "kung fu" as appropriate. Learning this application environment
in order to meet the needs of these projects will yield benefits
down the road for other projects as well.
We continue to invest significant staff resources in support
of CCS for the Alumni/Alfresco Web Content Management system.
We have taken steps to allow the users to operate the system
independently and securely. We hope this is of service to
the users as well as getting our own time back.
Developer Support has been tasked with
reviewing, researching and making functional a suite of tools in
support of developing software in ISDA and, in turn, IS&T and the
larger MIT community. This is a significant effort as it involves
re-factoring code and previous work to make some "viable services".
We expect project work to be defined and initiated in the coming
quarter.
Our various web services had no unscheduled outages yielding
100% availability.
Athena 10 preview was delivered. This project continues on track
to finish Athena 10 workstation by 1/2009 and cluster support by
summer 2009. Efforts appear promising we will substantially beat
the summer deadline.
The perMIT project has been delayed for administrative (HR) reasons.
As all hurdles have been overcome we are now in the hiring process
and intend to have a developer resource and progress made during the
next quarter. Handling of this project has been moved to Identity
Services. Identity Services is also coordinating the development
effort for correction and completion of the RolesUI project in
collaboration with DRS.
Projects likely spinning up for next quarter: Configuration Management,
System and Application Monitoring and Metrics (SAMM), Touchstone 2.0,
MySQL DB Service.
Touchstone went live as of 9/18/2008. The Identity Services
team is now working with various applications and developers to
properly enable Touchstone as the primary access mechanism for
those applications. As expected, these applications need to
consider user workflow issues as we move towards a more appropriate
single-sign-on and identity managed environment. While Touchstone
has been available for some time to applications it has not been
formally "production" until now. We are collecting statistics and
they are noted, with some explanation. We have yet
to determine how to effectively manage these statistics going forward.
The core Identity Providers representing the MIT community identities
indicate the following Touchstone Access Request counts as:
From July 1 to Sep 30 Touchstone usage has been:
Application Access involving authN: 24205
Application Access "single sign-on": 9213
Total App Access requests via Touchstone: 33418
Touchstone Access by application:
Stellar = 31457, Wikis = 1377, Teamspaces = 324, Jira = 177
By Authentication Method:
username/password: 23210
MIT certificates: 514 (this capability was added on 9/18)
Kerberos: 481
CAMS - The Collaboration Account Management System access counts
are trivial since CAMS was made available on 9/18 as well. We have
had only 63 accesses via CAMS. This will obviously increase as
applications avail themselves of the CAMS capabilities.
April through June 2008
- Touchstone continues to be one of our most important projects. In spite of family emergencies that cost several person weeks of work, development has been largely on schedule. There have been issues around setting up staging and production systems -- slowly but surely these are being resolved. Functional testing is in good shape, stress and load-testing awaits the training and consulting services available with the purchase of the new StressTester tool from Reflective Solutions. We have been intensely engaged with the key customers (esp Stellar, Clearspace) to make sure that they have the functionality that they need to go live in the fall in a phased approach. The full production system will probably not be handed over to OIS to maintain until October or so.
- Web infrastructure and developer support of web service projects has used some extra resources in the last quarter -- a new Geo Codes service provider has been needed, DSPS has helped with issues on the new Roles app. The team has been tasked with integrating Clearspace with MIT infrastructure services and this has impacted work on other projects.
- Athena 10 is on schedule for a fall preview, at the expense of developer tools work.
- The priority of integrating Clearspace with MIT infrastructure has delayed work on Touchstone database configuration and PHP systems for the SDLS, QuickPages, and IS&T website.
- With the departure of the senior developer from the Stellar team, a resource was loaned from DSPS to complete the gradebook work required for the fall.
- IS&T website went before TAP, findings require that the team prove the high availability/slashdot-resistant architecture for Drupal and resubmit this to TAP. This will involve some cost in both time and money that must be spent on this proof of concept before the actual site development can begin. No date can yet be committed for delivery of the IS&T website. However, site map work and functional specification is still on-going, as well as migration planning, as this would be needed regardless of the future CMS platform.
- Alumni Association website still has major outstanding bugs, one of the most severe seems to be fixed in the most recent stable release of Alfresco (2.1 SP 3), so we will begin a process of integrating our modifications with that SP3 and testing it in a staging environment before rolling it out to Alumni.
- Thalia is preparing a final release before going into production. Official production is dependent on "system readiness" configuration with the shared MySQL cluster and more thorough runbook documentation and automated procedures. Clearspace integration has delayed some of the app support team work necessary, but Thalia is still expected to be live by the fall.
- QuickPages is partly backburnered due to higher priorities, but work is still on-going.
- SDLS still has ongoing work, is affected by the higher prioritization of Clearspace by the app support team.
...