Information Systems - what we do

Building on yesterday's list of technologies use by the Information Systems team here at the University, here are some of the services that we run. Much of this will probably only make sense to people inside the University.

• Forum
• The authentication wrapper for Google Apps @ Cambridge
• Managed Web Server
• Managed Wiki Service
• Raven web authentication
• TLS Certificate Scheme
• University Map
• Web Search (spidering back-end, the search.cam interface is run by others)
• Webtools Web Server (hosting miscellaneous UIS infrastructure)

In addition, we contribute to a number of services run by other parts of UIS:

• CamCERT
• Falcon CMS
• Git Repository Hosting Service
• Network Traffic Analysis (for Traffic Charging and intrusion detection by CERT)
• UIS News Service

So now you know.

An Information Systems colophon

I've followed the work of Government Digital Service (GDS - the people behind GOV.UK) for a while. It seems to me that an organisation dedicated to “leading the digital transformation of government” probably knows a thing or two that's relevant to the digital transformation of a university.

GDS have a blog, and their list of technologies that they use is interesting. Work I've been doing recently means that I've created a similar list of the technologies used within my Information Services team here at the University. For what its worth this what it looks like:

Core servers

• Most services run on virtual machines provided by an internal VMware cluster
• Most run under Linux - SuSE Enterprise, Ubuntu, or Debian
• High-availability clusters use Corosync & Pacemaker
• Servers are built using our internal BES build system
• We have one legacy service using Solaris

Base software products

• Some services are based on existing software, including phpBB and Mediawiki
• The Web Search service is provided by Funnelback

Technologies

We rely on, and in some cases also support, a range of technologies:

• Ucam WebAuth, Shibboleth, SAML for web authentication
• LDAP and the University's Lookup service (and its API) for authorisation
• TLS, PKI and X509 certificates for web security
• OpenStreetMap and its API for geographic information
• AbFab, EAP, PAM, and RADUIS as part of investigations into Moonshot
• Google APIs for Google Apps integration
• Netflow for network traffic analysis

Applications (incl. Frameworks, etc)

• Our current favorite development environment is Python and Django
• Other systems use C, Perl (with HTML::Mason), Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby (with Rails)
• System administration relies heavily on shell (normally Bash)
• Our ‘Managed CMS’ service is based on Plone
• Web Sites run under Apache and Tomcat

Database and other storage

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL with Slony for replication

Monitoring, managing and alerting

• Services are monitored with Nagios
• Collectd collects statistics and Graphite and Grafana visualise them
• Servers are increasingly built and manage with Ansible
• We are moving towards Git (with an internal Gitolite service) for version control, but also use (at least) SVN, CVS, RCS and SCCS!

Supporting Tools

• Central RT system for support tickets
• Trac and Mantis for bug tracking
• We've been experimenting with LeanKit and Asana for program and project management