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Integrated Reward System (IRS)

This page gives an overview of the Integrated Reward System (IRS), describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description

The Integrated Reward System allows staff to apply for rewards, and allows HR and departmental staff to administrate the reward process, including collecting references and scoring applications.

The only reward scheme implemented so far is Academic Career Pathways: Research and Teaching (ACP R&T, formerly just ACP, formerly Senior Academic Promotions / SAP), which allows senior academics to apply for promotion.

The Referee Portal and Referee Admin Console components of the system have been used in the past to support another reward scheme, Professorial Pay Review (PPR), but PPR has never been fully supported by IRS.

While the original vision was to have all reward schemes implemented in IRS, the current thinking is that others may or may not be a good fit, depending on their similarity to ACP. This will need to be analysed before adding any additional schemes.

Service Status

IRS is a live service, and is used each year for that ACP round. ACP (as in the business process) runs every year. Demand on the system fluctuates throughout the year according to where we are in the cycle.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service. To ensure that you receive a response, always direct requests to servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.

Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues here.

Environments

IRS is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name Main Application URL Admin URL
Production https://irs.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/apply https://irs.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/admin
Staging https://staging.irs.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/apply https://staging.irs.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/admin
Development https://development.irs.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/apply https://development.irs.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/admin

The GCP console pages for managing the infrastructure of each component of the deployment are:

Name Main Application Hosting Database
Production GCP Cloud Run GCP Cloud SQL (Postgres)
Staging GCP Cloud Run GCP Cloud SQL (Postgres)
Development GCP Cloud Run GCP Cloud SQL (Postgres)

All environments share access to a set of secrets stored in the meta-project Secret Manager.

Source code

Source code for Integrated Reward System is spread over the following repositories:

Repository Description
Integrated Reward System¹ The Applicant Portal and Admin Console web-apps. Most of the business logic is here.
Referee¹ The Referee Portal (and Referee Admin Portal, which is only used for PPR)
Orchestra¹ Core backend component. Data repository and API. Implements some business logic.
Panel¹ Microservice where details of the committees who score applications, including members of the committees, are maintained
Cloud Infrastructure¹ Terraform configuration for infrastructure and deployment

¹ DevOps only

Technologies used

The following gives an overview of the technologies that Integrated Reward System is built on.

Category Language Framework(s)
Web Apps and Web Services Java 17 TomEE Plume, CDI, JAX/RS, JSF, Primefaces
DB PostgreSQL 16, Oracle 19c to connect to CHRIS_EXTRACT schema
GCP deployment Terraform

Operational documentation

The following gives an overview of how Integrated Reward System is deployed and maintained.

How and where Integrated Reward System is deployed

Deployment is via our standard terraform deployment CI pipeline.

Deploying a new release

Making a new release of the application is done via release automation.

Deployment is done by:

  1. Updating the deployment project's repository with any changes, including bumping the deployed web application release.
  2. Using the "play" buttons in the CI pipeline to deploy to production when happy. (Deployments to staging happen automatically on merges to main.)

Monitoring

Monitoring is configured as per our standard Google Cloud Run application module, with uptime checks configured for the referee and irs-webapp components, with the irs-webapp monitoring path configured as /admin/pages/system-status which validates the health of downstream services.

Debugging

The README.md files in each of the source code repositories provide information about debugging both local and deployed instances of the applications.

Service Management and tech lead

The service owner for Integrated Reward System is currently vacant

The service manager for the service is Andrew Crook

The tech lead for the service is Paul Badcock

The following engineers have operational experience with Integrated Reward System and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: