Person Service Epic

[mietcls]

Epic

End-Goal: Biblio becomes consumer of people service, and we use GISMO as single source of truth

Intermittent goals

Using GISMO as resource instead of LDAP, is a too big of a goal. We need intermittent goals to accomplish this.

Intermittent goal 1 "Historical database"

• Front-office does not handle person service in an intertwined way any longer
• No MongoDB for persons
• Back-office queries person service as a separate service
• Hash out which data we need

Effects:

• More stability
• will do the same thing as the last one
• Less conflicts and dirty information with persons

Intermittent goal 2: "Biblio becomes consumer of people service"

• Use GISMO as resource instead of LDAP
• Front-office does not handle person service in an intertwined way any longer
• No MongoDB for persons
• Back-office queries person service as a separate service

Intermittent goal 3: UI

Capture needs from librarians, to be hashed out later:

• Look up
  • Who is who
  • How is this person affiliated
  • which department / faculty / ...
  • via which ID
  • for which timespan
  • Is this person active today
  • Is this a memorialis person
• Merge / unmerge / link / unlink people coming from different data sources
• ...

Steps and Milestones

Step 0, Throughout

• [ ] Problem strategy trouble shooting with GISMO
• [ ] GPDR

Step 1 "See if it works – test version"

Milestone 1: person service stands by itself on the Nomad cluster

• [ ] Deploy
• [ ] Dockerised
• [ ] GRPC API
• [ ] Datamodel mindset needs to take shape
  • [ ] Storage
  • [ ] Outer world
  • [ ] NATS
• [ ] Person Service + NATS
  • [ ] Person service listens to NATS
  • [ ] Person service understands NATS protocol
  • [ ] Person service knows how to save those messages
• [ ] Security
  • [ ] GRPC (mtls, data at rest encryption, passwords at rest, ORCID token)
  • [ ] NATS

Summer holiday finish. Aim for a solid application that is future-proof and flexible. We do not need to solve every question, we can take an incremental approach.

Defined milestone: https://github.com/ugent-library/people/milestone/2

Milestone 2:

To be refined

• [ ] Manually send artificial messages to NATS in JSON to the person service, mimicking the SOAP bridge

Defined milestone: https://github.com/ugent-library/people/milestone/4

Milestone 3:

To be refined

• [ ] People service has API that can be used by the back-office (GRPC: get person, search people)

Defined milestone: https://github.com/ugent-library/people/milestone/3

Step 2: "make it visible, finish the circle"

To be refined

• [ ] Tinker on existing SOAP bridge that it would send the data to the MongoDB and to NATS (web sockets)
• [ ] Create sanity checks between databases
• [ ] Decide which cases we will solve and which ones we will not (Goal: conflict free high way – waiting VS fixing)

-> two worlds come to life where we still use the MongoDB, and where we can actually start filling up the people service and see the quality of the data

Milestones to be defined

Step 3: "adapt back-office"

To be refined

• [ ] Make sure back-office uses new service instead of MongoDb
• [ ] Keep MongoDB as a failsafe that we can go back if needed

Milestones to be defined

Step ? Front-office

To be refined

• [ ] Make sure front-office becomes more agnostic

Milestones to be defined

Risks

• We cannot see how bad or how good the new or old situation will or was be
• We will have to be very flexible in our approach to make sure the data quality is acceptable – as we will have to fix problems from the past as well. We will have to pick our battles.

Approach of co-existing two worlds

• Phasing out after a couple of months
• Matter of weeks that will take longer, not months or years

Based on scoping session: https://github.com/orgs/ugent-library/projects/5/views/2?pane=issue&itemId=26043288