University Payment System¶
[Team | Holberton Team] [Tech Lead | TBC] [Service Owner | sav25] [Service Manager | ajc322] [Product Manager | TBC]
This page gives an overview of the University Payment System, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.
Danger
The University Payment System uses technology, coding standards, and deployment methodologies which are not endorsed by the TDA and not standard practice for the DevOps division. Support is provided on a "best effort" basis and there is no expectation that new features will be developed within the existing system.
Service Description¶
UPS allows individuals within the University to make a one off payment to people. Once approved by finance, payments are loaded into CHRIS and paid via the payroll module.
Service Status¶
The University Payment System is live but users are being migrated to other services, with the aim to decommission UPS in February 2026.
Contact¶
Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues in the application repository.
Environments¶
The University Payment System is currently deployed to the following environments:
| Name | URL | Supporting VMs |
|---|---|---|
| Production | https://hrsystems.admin.cam.ac.uk/ups | ups-live1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk |
| Staging | https://testing.hrsystems.admin.cam.ac.uk/ups | ups-test1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk |
Source code¶
The source code for the University Payment System is spread over the following repositories:
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| Application Server | The source code for the main application server |
| Ansible Deployment | The ansible which manages the on-premise deployment |
Technologies used¶
The following gives an overview of the technologies the University Payment System is built on.
| Category | Language | Framework(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Application | Java 8 | Play Framework 1.5, Hibernate 5.2.10, Lucene 5.3, Apache Ivy 2.4.0 |
Operational documentation¶
The following gives an overview of how the University Payment System is deployed and maintained.
How and where the University Payment System is deployed¶
Play! Framework can automatically generate a WAR file for deployment. Batch files (see below) have been created to automate this process.
Development¶
- Execute
{Project Working Copy}/build/create_war_dev.bat - Output is to
{Project Working Copy}/build/dist/ups_dev.war
Deployment¶
The on-premise deployment is managed by the UPS Ansible deployment repository.
Load Balancer¶
Round-robin load balancing of HTTP traffic with sticky sessions (stickiness controlled by load balancer). SSL offloading is also performed by the load balancer.
HTTP Headers set (for use by application). See Wikipedia for a full list of HTTP Headers.
X-Forwarded-Proto - a de facto standard for identifying the originating protocol of an HTTP
request, since a reverse proxy (load balancer) may communicate with a web server using HTTP even if
the request to the reverse proxy is HTTPS.
X-Forwarded-For - a de facto standard for identifying the originating IP address of a client
connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy or load balancer.
Service Management¶
The Team responsible for this service is Holberton Team.
The Tech Lead for this service is TBC.
The Service Owner for this service is sav25.
The Service Manager for this service is ajc322.
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: