2019-02-22 - System Operations and Management SIG Agenda and Notes

Demo on FOLIO Discovery integration

• Harry will demonstrate the integration of EDS. It will work in the same way for VuFind, Blacklight, others
  • Harry demonstrated the integration from EDS to FOLIO, using a demo instance with about 200,000 items in it. The items have been loaded into the EDS instance in a batch, which is the current way EDS is usually populated. OAI-PMH harvesting is in development and needs to be tested.
  • In the EDS display, the holding and item information is retrieved from FOLIO with the RTAC API (Real Time Availabilty Check). In addition, "My account" features such as renewal and checking items out are also available through the API.
  • At this time, the API relies on FOLIO's rules to tell if a patron is eligible to renew - but can't tell at this time the item level detail that would say if an item is renewable.
  • Holds (called Requesting in FOLIO) still needs development.
  • VuFind and Blacklight will be able to use these APIs
  • Florian Ruckelshausen asked how e-resources are made available. Harry replied that it is a feature of discovery services to show links to where the items can be accessed.
  • The API is part of the checked-in codebase
  • Also integrated with GOBI. The standard publisher API is supported plus some customizations to preserve privacy.
  • There is also work being done in the data import group to translate order data in 9xx fields.
  • Kathleen Barry asked if the holdings and item information coming over RTAC could be expanded to include additional fields Harry said it could be expanded.

Review issues of dependency resolution and referential integrity with Hkaplanian ; see the group discussion of 2019-02-08 - System Operations and Management SIG Agenda and Notes .

spampell explained that they recommend doing dependency resolution outside of Okapi, and that a disaster resolution path is unclear. Even upgrades and rollbacks are not well provided for at this time.

Hkaplanian agreed that all these issues had been brought up also by the EBSCO dev team. He will create some features in JIRA and review with SIG to see what next steps are.

Further discussion: FOLIO is hard to deploy - wasn't clear that the Okapi version Ingolf used was deprecated. Currently module descriptors can have older and newer mixed. The TAMU devs only pull in the mods they need manually.

Right now there's no guarantee that the modules are backwards compatible and how far.

Dale Arntson raised a concern about bug fixes in the micro-services environment where every implementation will be slightly different. spampell replied that moving out of the monolithic convention gives you a lot of benefits but adds a lot of complications. Very important to adhere to a unified philosophy of data management, and point to the need to better manage dependencies. "It's just the nature of the beast that it's more complex to run."

Stephen has been evangelizing on the topic of guiding principles for developing microservices/cloud apps and has recommended these principles to the group: https://12factor.net/ He has discussed briefly with Tod Olson, Wayne Schneider, Jakub. jroot mentioned that the report for the Tech Council raised many of these issues: how to version schemas, adherence to tenets of microservices. The repoirt is in the hands of the Tech Council, who will resolve the issues. They have already begun with a security audit and a recommendation for a technical writer.

patty.wanninger asked about SIGs who are most familiar with the monolithic system and are saying "How" not "what". Stephen agreed that many active participants are having a hard time understanding the concept of abstraction layers as opposed to querying everything in a SQL table.

Stephen said he is preparing a workshop for a campus meeting next week about changing your midset to work with microservices and if it is successful he would be willing to share as FOLIO Forum.

Ingolf took a day off on March 1; there is a schedule for Mar 8

Suggestions for the next sessions ? Next week Harry will present features on a dependency tool spearate from Okapi, and features to do with software releases, rollback, and disaster recovery.

March 8th Ann-Marie Breaux (Deactivated) will be asked to demo the GOBI integration.