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Research Grant Expenditure Application (RGEA)

[Team | TBC] [Tech Lead | ad2139] [Service Owner | weer2] [Service Manager | weer2] [Product Manager | TBC]

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

Service Description

The RGEA application is a Grails web application that provides PIs (Principal Investigators) with an online "bank account" view of their grants. It shows, using CUFS data:

  • How much money has been spent
  • What it was spent on
  • How much is left
  • How much would be left if the spending profile was modified via future commitments

Service Status

The RGEA is currently live.

It is expected that the functionality provided by RGEA will be migrated as part of the Transforming Research Programme.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to uis-devops-division@lists.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 uis-devops-division@lists.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 application repository.

Environments

The RGEA is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name URL Supporting VMs
Production http://www.expenditure.admin.cam.ac.uk rgea-live1.srv.uis.private.cam.ac.uk
Staging https://rgea-test.srv.uis.cam.ac.uk rgea-test1.srv.uis.private.cam.ac.uk

Unlike most systems, RGEA working on a single node and is not load balanced. Downtime should be planned around vulnerable periods and users should be informed.

Source code

The source code for the RGEA is spread over the following repositories:

Repository Description
Application Server The source code for the main application server
GREB ETL Batch processor
Ansible Infrastructure Deployment The Ansible infrastructure code for deploying the application server to on-prem hosts
Cloud Infrastructure Deployment The Terraform infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP (not currently in use)

Technologies used

The following gives an overview of the technologies the RGEA is built on.

Category Language Framework(s)
Server Java 8 Grails, Spring, Spring Batch
ETL (Greb) Java 8 Groovy

Operational documentation

The following gives an overview of how RGEA is deployed and maintained.

How and where the RGEA is deployed

RGEA is deployed on a single node per environment and uses a on-host MySQL instance for data caching.

Deploying a new release

After tagging, new releases are deployed via Ansible. The run-ansible-playbook.sh should be run to deploy new version. e.g.

# On client machine
eval $(op signin)
source ./rgea-live-setup
./run-ansible-playbook.sh -i rgea-live rgea-playbook.yml --diff

Monitoring

RGEA is monitored by nagios. This checks that the status of the home page returns a 200 result.

Debugging

Further debugging instructions can be found on the RGEA Wiki.

Service Management

The Team responsible for this service is TBC.

The Tech Lead for this service is ad2139.

The Service Owner for this service is weer2.

The Service Manager for this service is weer2.

The Product Manager for this service is TBC.

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