InCommon Operations Notifications

[Nick Roy <>]

Hello,

I’m writing to share an update on the work that InCommon has undertaken on the Federation Manager software, InCommon’s core customer relationship management, metadata management, and workflow application.  A roadmap for our software development efforts on this application is available at: https://spaces.internet2.edu/x/_omTBg

InCommon has promoted version 2.0 of the Federation Manager into production.  While most users will not see any difference to the application, please rest assured that the InCommon staff is using the improved user interface which you should start to see with the version 2.1 release.  We chose to deploy and adopt the staff-facing UI first - to ensure that we are satisfied with the work before exposing the changes to our customers.

Changes include:

1. Moved Federation Manager codebase into Internet2’s GitHub Enterprise account to allow flexible developer collaboration and ease automation for deployments

2. Added Twitter Bootstrap semantics to the RA interface in preparation for future design/workflow changes

3. Added Docker containerization utilities in preparation for our own containerized deployment of the application

4. Provisioning changes will enable us to easily populate a staging version of the application with needed user accounts

5. Changes to the application infrastructure to integrate with our cloud-based continuous integration pipeline and staging environment

6. Integrated error messages in staging with Slack so developers and architects can quickly see issues that arise in that environment

7. Dependency updates

8. Performance improvements (elimination of duplicate database calls, etc.)

Further, our intent over the next months is to continue the work on the staging environment and DevOps practice (gained with shared knowledge contributed by the work that is happening in the TIER packaging space) with a goal of moving the production Federation Manager and InCommon operations into a containerized, cloud-based, readily scalable and hardened environment.  Our intent is for you, as our customer, to not notice that this work is happening.  Please rest assured that this work is in the service of making our operations more efficient and scalable, which will benefit InCommon Participants.

If you have any questions about this or any future Federation Manager releases, please let me know.

Best Regards,

Nick Roy

Director of Technology and Strategy, InCommon