[OSGeo-Board] Fwd: Migration plan - updated to v4

[Auke Jilderda]

Tyler, Jo,

sorry for a somewhat slow response but I read the migration plan.  It
looks very good!  I have some suggestions and thoughts on it:

The document explains the community does not want to be locked into a
vendor.  This has been an understandable and reasonable concern with
CollabNet's managed service -- even though CollabNet is an application
service provider and competes on service rather than lock-in and even
though the main building blocks are Open Source, it is not as easy as it
should be to migrate off of the site.

That said, there is good news.  For some time, CollabNet has had a
strategic initiative to open up the platform.  The latest release of
CEE, version 4.5.0, is the first release to start delivering this to
customers, introducing web APIs to allow users to access functionality
and data via programming interfaces.  Release 4.5.0 delivers the first
set of APIs and subsequent releases are scheduled to add more APIs.
While these APIs aim to open up the platform, they can certainly also be
of value for migrating off of the platform.  Perhaps it would be
interesting to have one of our experts introduce the web APIs to a few
key individuals at OSGeo.org?

Also, key aspects of a hosted service are (a) reliability (or backup &
recovery), (b) availability, (c) performance and scaleability, and (d)
security.  These topics are important and I would suggest to include
these topics into the migration document and explicitly define the
community's requirements on them.  Moreover, I strongly recommend to
define these requirements on the application (as opposed to machine)
level because that's the level that matters.  Just my two cents. :-)

Finally, it looks like the infrastructure will be a blend of different
solutions which inevitably raises the question about how to provide some
sort of a shared authentication or single sign-on.  To me, this seems so
important to the OSGeo community that it deserves a section on its own,
summarising what the different solutions can and cannot do and a
proposal of how to provide this.  As input to that section, the 4.5.0
release of CEE also introduces the ability to authenticate against
external sources such as an LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory service
and can work with a constellation of open servers, like OSL's.

One solution model could be to pursue what has already started over the
past months: having a constellation of open servers, like OSL's, at
subdomains with CEE providing the central domain.  The servers could
have a shared authentication and different subdomains providing
different functional parts, e.g. wiki for web content, drupal for
groupware, CEE for version control, tracking, and communication.
Different parts can have different requirements around reliability,
availability, and performance.  Such an approach would allow the
community to grow while also anchoring it.

Hope this helps,


Auke

On 28 September 2006 18:17, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> Attached is the migration plan that has been reviewed and updated
> based on some good feedback from the incubation mailing list and
> others.  I wanted to get it out to you so you could review before
> tomorrow and possibly approve it.
> 
> For those of you who read the previous version, I'm also attaching
> the diff. of the updates between the v3 and v4 docs.
> 
> The only problem I see is that until the ED is online, it's going to
> be tough to have anyone babysit this as a project.
> 
> Let me know if you have any questions.
> 
> Tyler
> 
> p.s. Jo has been offline and might have more to add.

--
Auke Jilderda, CollabNet, Inc., http://www.collab.net
phone: +31 402 364 205 (office), +31 620 622 960 (mobile)
mailto:auke at collab.net, facsimile: +31 402 364 231