TDWG 2020 LAC REMOTE SESSIONS
Manash Shah
Swedish Museum of Natural History
- Open source IT infrastructure
- Multiple components
- Microservices based architecture
-
The official code to deploy and maintain a Living Atlas (LA) portal:
https://github.com/atlasoflivingaustralia/ala-install
-
Ansible software is used
- Provisioning
- Configuration management
- Application deployment
- Infrastructure as code
- that means that we setup and maintain LA Portals
- ... with this common ansible
ala-installansible code - ... that describes the different steps to achieve it
- ... without manual work in the servers
- ... and with an human-readable basic text language
- ... install this, copy that, restart that there, etc
- But to do this we need to set up some variables defining each LA portal
- These are the ansible inventories
- ... which provides information about each LA site:
- name of the servers to use,
- which LA service to install in which servers,
- domain, organization name, contact email,
- and other similar variables
- An utility that helps you to obtain these inventories for your LA portal
- Simplify the configuration, installation & maintainence
- Get a functional configuration for the setup using ansible
- Scaffolds necessary ALA inventory files
- but other things like a starting branding theme
- Web version: https://generator.l-a.site/
- or interactive Command Line Tool version https://www.npmjs.com/package/generator-living-atlas
- Possible to rerun to add or update modules
- We have some tools, helpers, documentation, support forums, etcetera,
- But sometimes this is not enough to start
- In this case we have also the remote sessions
- Conducted by 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
- 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
- Data and content management
- Security management
- Customization
- Scaling and moving to production
- 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.