SIParCS 2017- Derrick Jackson
Derrick Jackson, Jackson State University
Capstone Microservices: Application Development Principles and Technologies
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.
Our SIParCS 2017 project focused on developing production level microservices based on 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 developed an example web application based on these services. This talk will present the motivations behind the project, the development principles and technologies we used to build our application and the challenges we encountered.
Mentors: Eric Nienhouse, Nathan Hook