P4: Architecture Observations and Suggestions

Our understanding of the Custos service on a high level

What is Custos ?

It is a software framework that provides common security operations for science gateways such as user identity and access management, gateway tenant profile management, resource secrets management, and groups and sharing management.

Architecture

• Custos is developed based on a microservice architecture
• All the communications between the microservices happens through the grpc protocol
• All the REST endpoints are exposed through envoy side car which takes care of the REST to grpC messages conversion

Architectural Observations based on the Testing experience

• During the Custos Deployment we observed that the pod custos-messaging-core-service is stuck in crash back loop off status. We are not sure if its an expected behaviour. If it isnt may be having a look at this particular service would be vital
• The custos application (front end) wasnt able to handle huge volume of user records and it wasnt displaying any records. It seems like the UI design needs a little enhancement
• The application doesnt seem to handle huge volume of requests (load) . We observed coniderable amount of performance degradation and frequesnt failures after the rest endpoints were hit with 100 parallel requests.