Introduction
Those with ideas for future newsletter items should contact the LSST:UK Project Managers (George Beckett and Terry Sloanlusc_pm@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk), while everyone is encouraged to subscribe to the Rubin Observatory Digest for more general news from the US observatory team.
Dummy header for Ellen, Benjamin and Ofer
QianjunHang , Benjamin Joachimi , Ofer Lahav
Dummy header for Stelios
Spent a week in Tucson (Arizona) where I met and worked with the Rubin Observatory SQuaRE team who are developing and operating the Rubin Science Platform.
The targets of the trip were to work through various issues & questions we had as operators of the UK-based RSP, to gain a better understanding of the various components of the system and the process used to manage, operate & make upgrades to deployments, to identify areas where contributions could be made back to the project and build a closer working relationship with the team.
Throughout the trip we had a daily meetup with the team to discuss the ongoing work, with a few focus sessions being held for us to discuss UK:DAC specific matters. Some of these ended up in debugging sessions to work through some problems we were facing, while one of the meetings consisted of a Q & A session where we went through a number of questions, some technical while some more general future plans-related.
Going into a bit more details regarding technical discussions that were had:
We went through the "Patch Thursday" meeting where the team made their weekly patches to all the instances of the RSP that they operate. This process mainly involved the use of ArgoCD, which automatically recognizes changes to the configuration files in Github that the deployments are based on, so the team goes through each of the services and synchronizes them, which automatically deletes recreates the Kubernetes deployment for that service. There are some intricacies that were involved such as deleting user sessions from a database, and notifying users which I've documented and plan on exercising with the UK RSP as well.
Some of the open issues here in the UK:DAC were covered and we have a clear plan on moving forward, in particular regarding making the RSP TAP service available, customizing the Firefly TAP service list as well as parts of the main home page, as well as the process of upgrading tokens & certificates (Vault / SSL) for a production deployment without downtime.
There were a few ideas that are worth mentioning which may be useful to the UK Dev teams:
Use of Sup! Slack bot for providing update summaries before meetings.
This helps keep meeting shorter as managers have an idea of progress/issues before the meeting, allowing the more pressing matters to be discussed during the meeting hours.Use of Commercial Cloud Services
The Rubin SQuaRE team are very heavily invested into the use of Cloud Services (Google mostly). From discussions I had with the devs of the team and the team manager, the increase in velocity of development and minimization of operations costs and overal cost of solving issues which appear when using an in house solution, or Academic clouds which aren't as polished & easy to use is worth the extra costs, which aren't as high as it may seem if adjusting for hidden costs (cost of power, admins of cloud,etc..)Weekly releases
As mentioned above the team does weekly releases and this type of agile development has many benefits, which would perhaps be beneficial for us to replicate.Quick daily stand ups
Useful in agile development, and even more so in teams like the SQuaRE team which are split between remote & in-office developers.
Overall a positive and productive trip, both in terms of improving our experience on how to best operate and maintain the RSP, but also in terms of building a relationship with the Rubin SQuaRE team which will be beneficial for future work on the Rubin project.
Dummy header for Dominic, Tom and Tim
Dominic Sloan-Murphy , Tom J Wilson , Tim Naylor
Dummy header for Dan
LINCC Tech Talks
To be written
Mention LINCC session at PCW
https://community.lsst.org/t/lincc-tech-talks-series-starting-october-13-2022/7108
Forthcoming meetings of interest
Meetings of potential interest for the coming months include:
27th February – 3rd March – DESC Collaboration Meeting (virtual). Details to be published on DESC members website (login required).
Members of the Consortium (not in receipt of travel funding through one of the Science Centre grants) may apply for travel support for meetings of this kind via the the LSST:UK Pool Travel Fund. Details are available at Forthcoming LSST-related Meetings .
Note that the current list of forthcoming meeting is always available on the Relevant Meetings page. You may also wish to check information held on the LSST organisation website LSST-organised events and the LSST Corporation website.
Announcements
If you have significant announcements that are directly relevant to LSST:UK and would like to share the announcement in a future newsletter, please contact the LSST:UK project managers.