NBN Atlas production environment - AtlasOfLivingAustralia/documentation GitHub Wiki

Introduction

The NBN Atlas is managed and developed by the National Biodiversity Network (NBN), a UK charity whose priority is to grow national commitment to sharing biological data and information. The NBN Atlas can be found here: https://nbnatlas.org/ and it is the base for three country hubs: NBN Atlas Isle of Man, NBN Atlas Scotland and NBN Atlas Wales.

The objectives of the NBN Atlas concern education, promotion of biodiversity and providing a trusted portal for UK biodiversity data.

NBN Atlas development

The NBN Trust employs one full-time developer to manage, support and develop the NBN Atlas and country hubs.

NBN Atlas architecture

The NBN Atlas uses the following user-facing ALA components:

alerts
bie (hub specific)
biocache-hubs (hub specific)
collectory
regions (hub specific)
spatial-portal (hub specific)
specieslist
webapi
userdetails

These are supported by the following components which are shared among all hubs:

bie-index
biocache-service
biocache-store
cas
image-service
layer-ingestion
layers-service
logger-service
sds

(Not so) current production environment diagram:

The NBN Atlas is currently running on AWS EC2 and Microsoft Azure and comprises more than 40 virtual machine instances. The Cassandra biocache occurrence database is sharded across 4 servers, as is the main biocache SOLR index. The hub-specific front-end components are hosted on EC2 t2.micro instances, except for the spatial portals which are t2.medium instances. Other components (e.g. bie-index, layers-service) require larger servers.

NBN Atlas species dictionary

The NBN Atlas uses the UK Species Inventory as the species dictionary for the name indexer.

Overview of content and users

The NBN Atlas holds:

219 million species records
127 data providers
xx spatial layers
3219 registered users (average of 434 users per day)