Self-Service Gateway¶
This page gives an overview of the Self-Service Gateway, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.
Service Description¶
This service provides a web application for the purchase and managment of data storage services. The two main classes of storage available are research storage provided by Research Computing Services and institutional storage provided by the Institutional File Storage service.
There is also some documentation on payment methods
Service Status¶
The Self-Service Gateway is currently live.
Contact¶
Technical queries and support should be directed to ssgw-admin@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 ssgw-admin@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 application repository.
Environments¶
The Self-Service Gateway is currently deployed to the following environments:
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.
Notification channel(s) for environments¶
| Environment | Display name | |
|---|---|---|
| Production | Self-Service Gateway - DevOps Team email Channel | cloud@uis.cam.ac.uk |
| Staging | Self-Service Gateway - DevOps Team email Channel | cloud@uis.cam.ac.uk |
Source code¶
The source code for the Self-Service Gateway is spread over the following repositories:
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| Application Server | The source code for the main application server |
| CUFS API Microservice | The source code for the micro-service querying CUFS |
| Infrastructure Deployment | The Terraform infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP |
Technologies used¶
The following gives an overview of the technologies the Self-Service Gateway is built on.
| Category | Language | Framework |
|---|---|---|
| Server | Python 3.9 | Django 3.2 |
| Client | JavaScript/jQuery | django-ucamprojectlight 1.1 |
Operational documentation¶
The following gives an overview of how the Self-Service Gateway is deployed and maintained.
How and where the Self-Service Gateway is deployed¶
- The Database for storage license/project data is a PostgreSQL database hosted by GCP Cloud SQL.
- The main web application is a Django application hosted by GCP Cloud Run.
- The CUFS micro-service is also Django application hosted by GCP Cloud Run.
- The application stores documents (Purchase Orders) in a GCP storage bucket.
- There are a number of asynchronous processes which rely on a GCP Cloud Tasks queue.
The application submits jobs to the queue that callback the application's application's
cloud_tasks/endpoint. - There are a number of scheduled processes that are invoked by GCP Cloud Scheduler.
Deploying a new release¶
The README.md file in the Infrastructure Deployment repository explains how to deploy the Self-Service Gateway.
Monitoring¶
- GCP Cloud Monitoring for tracking the health of applications in the environments and sending alert emails when problems are detected.
- Cloud Logs for tracking individual requests/responses to/from the web application and the synchronisation job application.
Debugging¶
The README.md files in each of the source code repositories provide information about debugging both local and deployed instances of the applications.
Testing¶
When developing new features, a manual "happy path" regression testing script is available and should be used to ensure that no existing features have been broken.
Administration¶
Any operational or administration issues should be raised as an issue in a repository for this purpose.
Service Management and tech lead¶
The service owner for the Self-Service Gateway is Abraham Martin.
The service manager and tech lead for the Self-Service Gateway is Mike Bamford.
The following engineers have operational experience with the Self-Service Gateway and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: