2021-02-12 - Sys Ops & Management SIG Agenda and Notes

Marc Johnson , all

Marc Johnson wrote in the Slack chat:

"Challenge

Implementing organisations need to be able to schedule aged to lost ... billing processes to run when they choose.

They will often choose to run these overnight in order to avoid reduce the load on systems and impact on day to day activities.

This capability is needed for the 2021 R1 release.

Current Situation

The current implementation of these processes uses the okapi _timer interface. They are scheduled to run approximately every 30 minutes.

The Okapi _timer interface only allows endpoints to be invoked periodically (e.g. every 2 hours) not according to a specific schedule (e.g. 2am every Tuesday).

There are less than 3 weeks of development time remaining for the 2021 R1 release (for platform core modules) and the Core Functional team does not have capacity to make significant changes to this implementation.

Proposed Short Term Approach

It is believed that many organisations already have the ability to schedule processes in their operational infrastructure already. Hence it has been suggested we use the organisations chosen mechanism for doing this outside of FOLIO.

I think this would involve the following development:

• Removal of the timer interface definition that runs these processes
• Provision of a new interface that defines endpoints for each of these processes

And configuration by the hosting provider (including the hosted reference environments) of:

• a user that has permissions to invoke these processes
• a scheduled task that logs in as the user and invokes the relevant proc

Organisations will likely need to schedule these processes separately meaning two separate tasks and schedules are likely to be needed."

An http request gets sent to OKAPI via Cron and OKAPI send the message to the process to execute.

It might be interesting to provide an option in the future to trigger these events internally, externally or a mixture of both.

Today a library does not have the ability to turn off these events.  This will need to be updated in the future in Mod-Circulation-storage.

Right now, we don't have the developer resources to get all this work done.

Wayne, yes it would just be an http request, but it means that institutions need to develop a simple FOLIO app/client and user to set this up.

Something could be built to demonstrate this (ex. cli stripes container).  Would need to engage the FOLIO dev ops team.

Wayne, this is an all or nothing deal for right now?  Marc, we would like to make as few changes as possible.  Will focus on just these two areas for circulation.

Marc has started a document for how we could schedule jobs in FOLIO in the future.  Marc will circulate.

If this was not needed for R1, we would be focusing on the bigger larger solution.  This proposal should not the the standard way for the future.