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Recruitment Administration System (RAS)

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

Danger

RAS uses technology, coding standards, and deployment methodologies which are not endorsed by the TDA and not standard practice for the DevOps team.

Service Description

RAS allows recruiters and departmental administrators to create and gain sign-off for vacancies. RAS provides a web-service for active vacancies to be listed on the Job Opportunities frontend, as well as synchronizing vacancy data to the central HR system (CHRIS) and Web Recruitment System via the HR Integration App.

RAS high-level architecture

Service Status

RAS is currently live.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to hr-systems-development@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 hr-systems-development@uis.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.

Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be reported to servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk

Issues related to the Oracle Database which serves as the primary data store for the application should be raised with the DBA Team.

Environments

RAS is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name URL Supporting VMs
Production https://hrsystems.admin.cam.ac.uk/ras-webapp/ hr-live1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk, hr-live2.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
Training (only available within the admin network) https://training.hrsystems.admin.cam.ac.uk/ras-webapp/ gillespie.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
Staging (only available within the admin network) https://testing.hrsystems.admin.cam.ac.uk/ras-webapp/ hr-test1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk, hr-test2.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
Development N/A N/A

A development instance will be created as part of the deployment to GCP.

Source Code

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

Repository Description
Application Server The source code for the main application server
On-Prem Infrastructure Deployment The Ansible configuration for the existing on-prem deployment.
Infrastructure Deployment The WIP Terraform infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP

The source code for RAS has not been fully audited and does not follow existing DevOps practices, therefore it is only available to DevOps team members actively working on the project.

Technologies Used

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

Category Language Framework(s)
Server Java Struts
Database Oracle 19c Hibernate
Frontend JavaScript JQuery / Bootstrap

Operational Documentation

Note

Information about the operation of the existing on-prem deployment is contained within the README.md of the web application.

The following gives an overview of how RAS will be deployed and maintained within GCP:

Deployment

The on-premise deployment is managed by the HR Apps Ansible deployment repository. Traffic to the web-application is load balanced via the UIS Load Balancer, which additionally provides SSL termination.

Deployment to the GCP environment is via our standard terraform deployment CI pipeline.

Monitoring

Monitoring is configured as per our standard Google Cloud Run application module.

Access Management

Access management is managed internally within the application, with the application holding a list of users who are able to access the admin UI and their permissions within the Oracle database. Therefore access needs to be granted by an existing super-user of the application.

Service Management

The service owner for the service is currently vacant

The service manager for the service is Andrew Crook

The tech lead for the service is Abubakar Zubair

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