SIParCS 2017- Adrien Bizimana

Capstone Microservices: Docker Application Deployment on the AWS Cloud

Recorded Talk

Although climate and weather information are vital to research and decision-making in a wide variety of societally important contexts, it is difficult for scientists, resource managers, and concerned citizens to access and share the expert knowledge required for analyzing and drawing conclusions from weather and climate data. The Capstone project intends to address this need with cyberinfrastructure for managing and analyzing climate and related data. Capstone is envisioned as a cloud-based “scientific data analysis as a service” platform that provides user access to a toolkit of reusable components which ease working with big data collections. These components can be used to build workflows for scientific data preparation and analysis, allowing scientists to focus on their science rather than wrestling with their data. This research focused on developing and deploying production-level microservices for commonly used and powerful climate data analysis tools like CDO and NCO. We built production-style, functional components of a microservice-oriented application using common web framework technologies. Our application is based on the SpringBoot framework and provides an API for running climate analysis functions remotely. We explored models for building, configuring, and deploying scientific data analysis tools in a cloud environment. We then developed a process for application deployment on the Amazon AWS environment using Docker images. This talk will present the AWS cloud environment, the deployment models and tools we used, the challenges we encountered, and the future directions of the project. We deployed our Docker-based web-enabled microservices on AWS Cloud using services provided by AWS such as EC2 Container Services (ECS) and Elastic Beanstalk (EB). We then mounted Elastic File System (EFS) with JSON configuration format for making our data more persistent and consistent. Furthermore, I will describe how our cloud environment is configured.

Mentors: Eric Nienhouse, Nathan Hook