Inside Atlas 2021: Information Technology Services and Development
Virginia Beach, VA — Our TLS staff is considered the ‘Face of Atlas’. Our Information Technology Services (ITS) and Development teams are the ‘heart’ of our operations; powering our operations behind the scenes to implement better solutions and support our customers. Here is a brief summary of the work accomplished over the past year.
Information Technology Services
The project to move from the colocation site of 17 years to a full migration into Azure that began in 2020 was completed in 2021. This move was completed without interruption to our hosted sites. In addition, we completed the following:
Incorporated new systems into our hosting services — namely GitHub for staff and customer web page editing and Kibana for viewing log files
Migrated and upgraded the Operating System of all servers from the colocation to Azure
Moved 15 ILLiad sites to Kubernetes bringing to 31 total sites
Completed PCI Attestation of Compliance SAQ-D
Increased recurring tasks to improve proactive maintenance, including regular backup/restore testing, security audits, Windows Update checks, and more
A primary focus for the past year was to build our Kubernetes-based hosting system using Azure Kuberbnetes Service (AKS). AKS offers a serverless, integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance.
All logs from AKS are now in Kibana, part of what is called the EFK stack (ElasticSearch, Fluent Bit, and Kibana). Initially this stack was running on the Kubernetes cluster, but was moved to a cloud hosted solution. ElasticSearch is the search engine that ingests the log data, indexes it, and performs searches. Fluent bit collects the log data from within the cluster and ships it to ElasticSearch. Kibana is the web frontend used for visualizations and querying ElasticSearch. Having all logs in the same place allows for interesting possibilities including the examination of usage patterns.
Atlas built ‘Poke’ that is comprised of an Azure web app for administration and an Azure Function backend to perform the actual monitoring actions. in 2021, Poke was updated switching to a SQL Server database that increases the performance of retrievals and updates allowing us to build relational models with the data.
‘Webster’ is a key component originally built to facilitate configuration of our web containers in AKS, but was updated to also handle keeping web pages in sync with GitHub for our hosted Virtual Machines (VM). With Webster, we are able to define the layout and settings for a site’s web pages and keeps those pages up to date with their GitHub repository(ies). Webster also sets up https bindings, applies IP restrictions, configures Shibboleth, monitors the W3SVC and Shibboleth services to ensure they are running, and more.
Development
The demands on Development were prompted by the demands of our customers to continue delivering services in a remote or hybrid environment. Despite the uncertainties presented in the past year, our Development team maintained pace and continued to add features, squash bugs, and assist with support requests.
The team found ways to refine processes to boost productivity and meet new goals and objectives. Some highlights include:
Release Ares v5.0 and Aeon v5.1
Address 293 backlog items
Assist with 265 support requests
Update 65 code repositories
Resolve 143 bugs
Complete 123 custom projects
Appraise 1037 code reviews & pull requests
In addition, we were able to welcome two (2) new developers to and promote two (2) existing members to the Development Team.
Looking Ahead
2021 was a very busy year in which we were able to make improvements to our hosting services, software development and internal processes to better meet evolving user needs. These improvements will allow us to better develop and deliver our services now and in the future.
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