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Raven OAuth2

This page gives an overview of the Raven OAuth2 service, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description

The Raven service provides a self-service, web-based interactive sign in service for the University. It has several parts. Raven OAuth2 provides a standard OAuth 2.0 interface for sites around the University.

This is provided by Google and conforms to the OpenID Connect specification. This also provides improved security using Google's 2-step verification.

Any application supporting sign in with Google can make use of Raven OAuth2. The cam.ac.uk Google Workspace is configured to authenticate users via the Raven Core Authenticator (a SAML2 IdP).

There is a dedicated documentation site for Raven including its OAuth2 interface.

Service Status

The Raven OAuth2 service is currently live. There are no plans to decommission the service.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to raven-support@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 raven-support@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 in the Raven Core Authenticator or Raven Infrastructure projects (both DevOps only).

Environments

Raven OAuth2 is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name Main Application URL GCP Project
Production https://core-idp.raven.cam.ac.uk/ Raven Core IdP - production
https://ravencore.prod.raven-core.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/
Staging https://test.core-idp.raven.cam.ac.uk/ Raven Core IdP - staging
https://ravencore.test.raven-core.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/
Development https://ravencore.devel.raven-core.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ Raven Core IdP - development

All environments access a meta project (Raven Core Idp meta) for shared secrets and monitoring.

Notification channel(s) for environments

Environment Display name Email
Production Raven core IdP - Wilson DevOps team email channel devops-wilson@uis.cam.ac.uk
Staging Raven core IdP - Wilson DevOps team email channel devops-wilson@uis.cam.ac.uk

Source code

Source code for Raven OAuth2 is spread over the following repositories:

Repository Description
Raven Core Authenticator1 Containerised Apache2 frontend which handles interactive authentication
Raven Infrastructure1 Terraform configuration for infrastructure and deployment

1 DevOps only

Technologies used

The following gives an overview of the technologies that Raven OAuth2 is built on.

Category Language Framework(s)
Authenticator Python 3.7 Django 2.2
djangosaml2idp
GCP deployment Terraform

Operational documentation

There is a dedicated operational documentation folder in the infrastructure Gitlab project (DevOps only).

How and where the service is deployed

The Raven Core infrastructure is deployed using Terraform, with releases of the authenticator application deployed by the GitLab CD pipelines associated with the infrastructure Gitlab project (DevOps only).

Deploying a new release

The README.md files in each of the source code repositories explain how to deploy the Authenticator App.

Monitoring

The monitoring and alerting system is based on Cloud Monitoring. Alert policies and metrics can be views in the Raven Core IdP meta project (DevOps only).

Our standard 'webapp' alerts have been configured:

  • Service uptime check from various geographic regions
  • SSL expiry checks

Debugging

See the Raven Core Authenticator project (DevOps only) for details on how to deploy a local development instance.

Service Management and tech lead

The service owner for Raven OAuth2 is Vijay Samtani.

The service manager for Raven OAuth2 is Dr Я Charles.

The tech lead for Raven OAuth2 is Robin Goodall.

The following engineers have operational experience with Raven OAuth2 and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: