2019-07-19 Meeting Notes

Owned by Steven Maglio
Last updated: Mar 22, 2021 by Diana Antova
6 min read

Date

  

Attendees

Steven Maglio
(tick)
Ian Lessing (Unlicensed)
(tick)
Vince Nievares
(error)
Kevin Wu
(error)
Diana Antova
(error)vacation
Reinard Dolleschel(tick)
christian.montecino (Unlicensed)(error)

Goals

  • Updates on continuing development
  • Review, organize and add to work items


Focus points for this meeting

General update

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
Welcome
  • Greetings and salutations

Vacations

Vince -  -  
Diana  - 
Gary -  -  


UC TechGroup
  • Ian Lessing (Unlicensed)
    • Demo / Intro to GraphQL
      • A standardized way of doing querying similar to OData
      • Really easy with javascript
      • Was using neo4j (graph database)
    • Containerizing Shibboleth - UCOP
      • Demonstrated taking an older application and containerizing it (removing over provisioning)
      • Then, in another container, containerizing Shibboleth
      • The test environment just used containerized instances to test out the application before moving into production

The rest of us didn't make it UC Tech.

All the session were recorded, so there should be video links soon. https://uctech.ucsb.edu/schedule



Campus AWS useSteven Maglio
  • Campus allows a for project account or departmental account. 
  • We can use a project account
  • We submit it thru Gateway, need an account/fund/sub
  • Jim Woods is willing to use our project as a test case
    •  - Steven respoke with Jim Woods and Gateway is not setup yet to get us into the pre-made accounts that Jim Woods and the Campus Team are working on. But, Gateway is setup to create an account which will be charged directly to the contract that Diana is setting up. Jim Woods has a similar contract setup for his work right now. And, he will be looking to migrate his current account into the "official account" once the Cloud team is ready to do that. We could probably do that same thing. His advice on preparing our implementation for a migration is to ensure that we could rebuild out cloud based services if needed.
  • We need a Redis database, maybe <5$/month, most likely free - security for chatbot commands - our Hubot permissions to run chatbot commands are stored in a brain (store). Right now it is stored in memory on Heroku, and every time chatbot goes to sleep we have to re-enter the permissions. We need to store them in a Redis database for a persistent storage. The Redis database is a standard for storing a Hubot brain.
  • And a SQL server database for storing users, apps, usage - get data out for reporting and account cleanup, lower the attack surface
  • Cost - $24/mo total
    • $11/mo for SQL Server database.
    • $13/mo for Redis database
  • Heroku will come later
  •   Diana met with Matt Hall. He is OK with us using AWS for the account cleanup purposes and the Hubot brain. We will create a project account when the environment is ready. Matt suggested that we use the native AWS RDS instead of SQL Server, but is not a requirement.

Developer Portal Migration to Drupal 8Ian Lessing (Unlicensed)

Motes: Drupal 8 Migration Notes

 Ian and Denise meeting on 4/30 to continue to work on the migration. In the last session they separated the site from the UCSB managed upstream. Will continue to update it thru composer.

 Denise had to reschedule due to UCTech commitment. Will meet on 5/8.

Denise S. & Ian L. had a working session on 5/14 and have another scheduled for 5/17.  Got setup with development environments utilizing Lando which utilizes Docker underneath.

 Ian and Denise met on Tuesday. Next meeting is next week on the 5th. Setup is similar as the UC Tech site where multiple developers are contributing to the development. 

 Using Lando (Dev with Lando - using Docker to create the same setup as Pantheon) to do local development. Will give others access. Ian and Denise will document it as well.

 Denise S. & Ian L. had working sessions on 7/8, 7/9, and 7/12. Next week they will be at UCTech. APIGEE-216

 Denise S. & Ian L. meet last Friday, , to look at some new information from Apigee. They have documentation on their site showing support for Drupal 8.

The way it reads, they have a template Drupal 8 site with the Apigee modules pre-installed. It is also based around Composer.

But, Steven and Ian are concerned about Composer being more work than we can take on. There is a conversation going on with Denise about this.


CAS 5.3 upgradeSteven Maglio

Targeting a deadline of August 2019. Ability to do headless authentication, which is what we need for the employee API. 

Will be able to transition from API keys. It will be a significant work for us.

CAS 5.3 Adds

  • OAuth 2.0 Support
  • OpenID Connect Protocol
  • JWT certificate download/verification support

 Noah Baker for ETS has setup Steven Maglio with access to the Test instance of CAS 5.3 to try out the new features for OAuth2 and JWTs. So far the testing hasn't been too promising. We are having a bit of trouble discovering how we can get the OAuth2 endpoint to respond with a JWT token. And, OIDC endpoint may have other difficulties related too it.


Reports and alertsDiana Antova 

  • christian.montecino (Unlicensed) Google analytics api usage reports - there is an issue with recording API usage. it does not match the gateway data. (APIGEE-189) Christian will start logging into a text file the API execution to compare with google analytics. 

  • Christian asked the Loggly cloud service provider rep to create a report for us to compare with the Google analytics report. 

  • The free account is expiring and Christian requested and extension. 

  • First we will compare Loggly usage to Google analytics. Then we will move the functionality to Splunk. 


Student Developed Applications
  • GoGaucho Team: Hengyu Lui / Jimmy Lin
  • Professors: Chandra Krintz / Tobias Hollerrer
  • GoGaucho Improvements
      • Good news. The iOS application had the username/password form removed from the application and it no longer retrieves students data which has been screen scraped from GOLD.
      • Jimmy (the Android Developer) is going to add a security token to the Heroku endpoint and will be upgrading the Android application to use it before we next meet.
      • Henry (iOS) will update the iOS application to use the secured Heroku endpoint before the end of the summer.
  • Next meeting on  

CS 48
  • Student: Krishna Nanda
  • Sponsor: Prof. Chandra Krintz
    • We're working to get her setup with a perm number so she can have the same experience as the students in her class.
  • Will ask if they are using any APIs. and feedback. Steven Maglio
  •  Sent an email Chandra that we won't have OAuth ready by the end of the summer.

Photos APIsDiana Antova
  • In progress, Farah Tahmasbi working on the API switch. (APIGEE-141)
    • Potentially deploying  

  • There will be a need to use campus photos in Campus Groups


Accounts for separated employees/student

Steven Maglio



DocumentationDiana Antova

Housing ServicesDiana Antova
  • Housing meet with Graduate Division about creating a web api that can provide information that an applicant was accepted as a Graduate Student and they are ready to start filling in Housing process forms
    • GradDiv was happy to help setup this API, they have in scheduled to be done before Fall Quarter
  • Housing meet with Undergraduate Admissions about creating a web api that can provide information that an applicant was accepted as a Graduate Student and they are ready to start filling in Housing process forms
    • Admissions had concerns about how to verify this information. Housing was thinking of having the applicant submit their login/password information to Housing and then housing could verify it; and admissions wasn't completely on board with that.
    • But, I think they are trying to find a way to make this possible
  • I think there is a 3rd API that Admissions is working on to call Housing, but maybe they are connected
    • There is something currently setup where Admissions has been directly accessing the Housing database; they are looking to change that into an API.

Employee APIDiana Antova
  • Library looking to get Employee/Staff information so that they can get employee information when a user logs into the ALMA system.
    • Currently, they are getting a dump of employees that they upload into this system. Getting this info in real-time would be a big improvement.
  • Kevin Wu and Adam Sottosanti have been developing this and they are currently testing it through the API Gateway
    • Steven Maglio Will work with Kevin on naming conventions in the creation of the proxy et al.
  • Jeremy is the replacement for Ana Fiddler, and he will be potentially driving this project from the Library side. Angela Chikowero is probably also driving this too.




Action items

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