Workshop Flexible Platform Solutions and longer titles

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OSOR: Services and Platform

Marco Battistoni & Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona(Unisys, GSyC/LibreSoft-URJC)marco.battistoni@be.unisys.com, jgb@gsyc.esMalaga, October 20th 2008OSOR Session at OSWC 2008

Copyright 2007, 2008 OSOR team

Some rights reserved. This presentation is distributed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, by Creative Commons, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

The original version of this presentation is available at http://osor.eu

Disclamer:

The views expressed in this document are purely those of the writer and may not, in any circumstances, be interpreted as stating an official position of the European Commission.

The European Commission does not guarantee the accuracy of the information included in this presentation, nor does it accept any responsibility for any use thereof.

Reference herein to any specific products, specifications, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the European Commission.

What is OSOR.eu?

Open Source Observatory and Repository

Set up as an IDABC initiative (OSO)

European platform for the exchange of:

libre (free, open source) software

Good practices in Open Source

Information and News

Aimed at public administrations

OSOR.eu

Objectives: Cooperation, sharing, pooling of resources, promotion of synergies

Strategy: Connect initiatives at all levels, share experiences and software, animate a lively OSOR community

OSOR Identity

A design that represents a concept

Easily recognizable

That has the following principles:

Community

Cooperation

Sharing

The OSOR Bees

Bees represent:

Community

Sharing

Cooperation

Provide a design for non technical users

Provide a design for non technical users

Website or Information Platform

Website with good practice in the use of libre software by public administrations where you can find:

News

Case studies

Events

Newsletters

other...

How can I Participate in OSOR?

There are 2 ways of Participating in OSOR

Your project is hosted directly in OSOR

Your project can be hosted in a Federated Repository.

Provide a design for non technical users

Website or Information Platform

Website with good practice in the use of libre software by public administrations where you can find:

News

Case studies

Events

Newsletters

other...

Provide a design for non technical users

Forge/Collaborative environment: support collaborative development, encourage and facilitate reuse (libre software for public administrations)

Repository of software

Development platform

Facilities for collaboration

Hosted in OSOR


Your project is physically hosted in OSOR

You need to be a registered user

You need to be compliant with the 10
Principles

You need to Fill out the Project Form

The 10 Principles

In brief

The project must be an Open Source project

The platform is reserved for software and projects that are publicly financed

Software or documentation that will be uploaded on the OSOR.eu must be made available for free and under a recognised Open Source licence

Project Registration Form

Project Approval

The OSOR Team will evaluate based on the 10 Principles your Project

Project approved!!

Welcome to OSOR!!

The other way: Federation

At National level, there are already similar initiative

OSOR is not in competition with the National Repositories

We want to Federate the National repositories to provide European visibility to the National Project

The other way: Federation

OSOR

How does it work?

The only requirement is that the repository has to be a Forge

The Forge has a plug-in/utility that allows to search in other Forges

To provide visibility to the national project, we do not need the project physically in OSOR.

Just connect with OSOR, federate with OSOR

Who is already connected?

Adullact with 401 projects

Forxa de Mancomun with 101 projects

Morfeo-Forge with 53 projects

La forja de Guadalinexwith 31 projects

CNIPA with 18 projects

EUPL

EUPL is a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) licence

The EUPL is a legal tool that is already in used by the European Commission

The EUPL has considered the specificity and diversity of Member States Law

The EUPL ensures downstream compatibility issues with the most relevant other licences

How does it work?

OSOR Website: ~ 20.000 Unique Visitors since July.

OSOR Forge: ~ 19.000 Unique Visitors since May.

OSOR Forge: 37 Projects physically hosted

OSOR Forge: 180 Users Registered

OSOR projects from federated forges: 1000 Projects that can be searched via OSOR

Technical issues: main characteristics

Two subsystems / three services:

Information platform: migration and evolution of OSO

Software development forge (including catalog):

Repository: uploading/downloading software, descriptions, and related items.

CDE: collaboration in libre software development

High level requirements:

High availability platform

Libre software for all components

COTS components with minor modifications

Specific requirements for each main service

Information platform

Create/update/publish several types of content:

News, case studies, reports

Events

IDABC OSS activities

Newsletters

other...

Tools to manage relationship with users

Surveys

Comments

RSS channels and other syndication means

Repository

Repository as a live catalog of libre software products

Software developed in the OSOR CDE or somewhere else

Unique taxonomy (coordinated with other forges)

OSOR project/product template for harmonizing information

Specific requirements: list of parameters of performance and user experience

CDE: Collaborative Development Environment

Forge-like platform

Augmented with some other collaboration means

Specific facilities for federation

Special consideration to the needs of public administrations

Several roles for different kinds of users:

Visitors: anonymous users, read-only access

Registered users: can be granted acces to project resources for helping in development tasks.

Project administrators: can access and grant permission to all resources (project management).

Hardware platform (1)

Physical configuration

Off-the-self hardware.

Full redundancy

All nodes providing services are duplicated.

High availability.

Storage nodes, service nodes

Hardware platform (2)

Logical configuration

Architecture based in virtualization techniques

Services separated in virtual machines

Improved security.

Simplified administration.

Recovery of faulted virtual nodes, migration between physical computers.

Hardware platform (3)

HW/SW configuration: disk servers

HW/SW configuration: service nodes (1)

HW/SW configuration: service nodes (2)

Hardware characteristics

Standard technologies:

Intel x86-64 compatible, 2 or more cores, 2 GHz or better.

RAM: 2 to 8 GB, depending on node.

Storage: Minimum RAID-1, with compatible controllers.

Redundant power supply.

Gigabit Ethernet network.

Nodes for processing (virtual machine hosters):

4-cores CPU 8 GB RAM

Nodes for storage (disk servers or backup server):

Storage space: 4 TB capacity, 2 TB available with RAID-1.

Upgradeable to 8 TB total / 4 TB available.

Gigabit network.

GE interfaces, Managed GE switches.

Housing and networking facilities

Physical requirements

Data-centre with physical security requirements against intrusion, natural disasters, etc.

Full rack hosting (42U).

Electrical availability: two separate electrical circuits.

Security

Firewalling provided by housing service.

Two redundant, high availability, managed firewalls.

Performance / Traffic

Connection to two major carriers well connected in Europe

Sustained rate 10 Mbps, with peak rates.

Availability: >99.9 %

System operation

24x7 System Operation Service

Zabbix server monitoring

Advanced monitoring

Alerting and monitoring features

Alerts via SMS and email

Two servers:

In the data center

In URJC labs

Software architecture

Operating system: Debian GNU/Linux (stable + security updates + custom improvements)

All software packages are libre software

Most software packages are standard Debian packages

Most prominent specific software:

Plone3 (information services)

GForge (basic repository and CDE)

Mailman (mailing lists)

Subversion (source code management)

Software products: Plone3

Stable and mature (available for more than 5 years)

Support available from several sources

Lively, active community

In good company (in use by many organizations)

Easy content edition, user friendly

Available in over 35 languages (some multilingual support)

Accessibility compliant (W3C's WAI-AA standards)

Workflows: several available

Security: Fine-grained role-based security model

Experience in public sector (ComunesPlone)

Software products: GForge 4.x

Well known, mature CDE (forge by default)

Support standard development tools, integrated into one web site:

SCM repository.

Bug tracking system.

Forums.

Mailing lists.

Task management.

Release management.

Expected platform for many libre software developers

Current status

Services being provided since May 2008 to testing partners

Accepting libre software projects:

Promoted by a public administration

Composed completely of libre software (OSI or FSF definitions)

Either for the repository or for full development

Active search for interested projects and possible synergies

Working with partners to improve service and coordination

The future (next months)

Promotion and dissemination

Hosting of more and more projects

Full operation, monitoring, feedback tracking

Identification of synergies and opportunities for collaboration across Europe

Improvement of facilities and services for users

Support of development and user communities (eg., GIS for public administrations)

Improvement of federation facilities

Check the real thing

OSOR (including migrated OSO):

http://osor.eu

Forge (admitting projects):

http://forge.osor.eu

OSOR software, presentations, etc:

OSOR project at http://forge.osor.eu

Feedback is welcome!

Libre software projects promoted by public administrations are welcome!

Come to the OSOR!

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Directorate-General for Informatics

October 20th 2008