Remote Support Sessions for Living Atlas Portal Deployment

TDWG 2020

Manash Shah

Swedish Museum of Natural History

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Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)

• Open source IT infrastructure
• Multiple components
• Microservices based architecture

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ala-install

• The official code to deploy and maintain a Living Atlas (LA) portal:

  https://github.com/atlasoflivingaustralia/ala-install

• Ansible software is used

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Ansible

• Provisioning
• Configuration management
• Application deployment
• Infrastructure as code

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Ansible (cont)

• setup and maintain LA Portals
• use common ansible ala-install code
• describes the different steps
• automate the steps
• install this, copy that file/folder, apply this permission, restart, etc
• reuse common or similar steps
• rerun the process in parts or full
• minimal manual steps in the servers
• human-readable basic text language
• share and replicate the process

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Ansible inventories

• Set up configuration variables defining the LA portal
• The ansible inventories
  • provides information about each LA site
  • define the servers to use
  • which LA service to install in which servers
  • passwords and security variables
  • domain, organization name, contact email and other similar variables

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Tool: generator-living-atlas

• An utility that helps to obtain the inventories for the LA portal
• Simplify the configuration, installation & maintainence
• Get a functional configuration for the setup using ansible
• Scaffolds necessary LA inventory files
• Additionally, a branding theme for a start

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Tool: generator-living-atlas (cont)

• Web version: https://generator.l-a.site/
• Interactive Command Line Tool version https://www.npmjs.com/package/generator-living-atlas
• Possible to rerun to add or update modules

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Need help?

• Tools, helpers, documentation, support forums

But sometimes this is not enough to start...

• In this case we have also the remote sessions

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Remote Sessions

• Conducted by LA Technical coordinator
• Introduction to LA platform
• Bootstrapping a new LA portal
• Test Installation or Production deployments
• Sessions prepared and conducted remotely
• More info: https://tinyurl.com/la-bootstrap-sessions

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What it includes

• Resolution of typical initial doubts
• Using LA generator to create/update the inventory files
• Virtual Machine provisioning
• Installation of modules
• Post installation steps
• Optionaly, theme customization

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The next steps

• Data and content management
• Security management
• Customization
• Scaling and moving to production

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Feedback from sessions until now

• All the participants found the session helpful; useful to have an idea about the framework and helped get up to speed with LA installation and configuration
• recommend newcomers to use these sessions because the explanation was very good and it’s a good way to understand implementation of the software
• Room for improvement: The virtualized environment we used was already set up, it could be more helpful if the sessions involved setting up the environment.