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Shibboleth Metadata Administration service

[Team | Wilson Team] [Tech Lead | rjg21] [Service Owner | vkhs1] [Service Manager | rc118] [Product Manager | TBC]

This page gives an overview of the Shibboleth Metadata Administration service (Metadata App), describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description

This service allows web site administrators in the University to register web sites so that they work with the shibboleth provided by the Raven SAML2 service and subsequently to manage those registrations. This is achieved by uploading 'SAML Metadata' describing those sites.

Service Status

The Metadata App is currently live.

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

The Metadata App is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name Main Application URL Django Admin URL
Production https://metadata.raven.cam.ac.uk/ https://metadata.raven.cam.ac.uk/admin
Staging https://webapp.test.shib-metadata.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ https://webapp.test.shib-metadata.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/admin
Development https://webapp.devel.shib-metadata.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ https://webapp.devel.shib-metadata.gcp.uis.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.

Notification channel(s) for environments

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

Source code

The source code for the Metadata App is spread over the following repositories:

Repository Description
Application Server The source code for the main application server
Infrastructure Deployment The Terraform infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP

Technologies used

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

Category Language Framework(s)
Web Application Python 3.8 Django 2.2
Database PostgreSQL 11 n/a

Operational documentation

The following gives an overview of how the Metadata App is deployed and maintained.

How and where the Metadata App is deployed

The database for metadata is a PostgreSQL database hosted by GCP Cloud SQL. The main web application is a classic Django application (not DRF), hosted by GCP Cloud Run.

The Metadata App infrastructure is deployed using Terraform, with releases of the main application application deployed by the GitLab CD pipelines associated with the infrastructure deployment repository.

Deploying a new release

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

Monitoring

The same method of monitoring the app is with Cloud Logs

Debugging

For debugging the deployed app see "Monitoring" above. For debugging locally the application README.md describes how the containerised app can be run.

Other operational documentation

Service Management

The Team responsible for this service is Wilson Team.

The Tech Lead for this service is rjg21.

The Service Owner for this service is vkhs1.

The Service Manager for this service is rc118.

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: