Figure out how the application will run on the server

[QuantumManiac]

Possible options:

• Kubernetes
• Docker
• No containerization, just a process manager (e.g. pm2)

[QuantumManiac]

Reaching out to CSC to discuss options. Email:

Hello,

My name is Chamath and I am a representative from the software sub-team of the Waterloo Rocketry Student Design Team. We requested to be onboarded as a club to CSC with the intention of migrating our cloud-hosted applications to CSC's servers and were successfully onboarded as of last week; we're excited to get started! We're currently looking into the migration process, and we'd like to ask a few questions about hosting with you.

As a bit of background, our first projects will be to migrate two of our web applications over to CSC servers: A React-based team website currently hosted on GitHub Pages Minerva, a Slack app/bot that our team uses to organize meetings and meeting reminders, currently hosted on AWS as Lambda Functions

Firstly, we have decided that it might be a good idea to containerize both of these applications. After taking a look at the CSC Cloud Docs, we noticed that k8s namespaces are tied to a specific user. Would it be possible to have a namespace, and therefore k8s deployments, that are owned by a club instead? If this is not possible what would your recommendations for alternatives be?

Both of these applications will need access to the outside world. In addition, we would like to use a custom domain (for the website waterloorocketry.com and if possible a subdomain of it for Minerva e.g., minerva.waterloorocketry.com) to access our applications with. Would this be possible?

We're currently using GitHub Actions for continuous deployment for both of these applications. Do you all have an established solution for automated deploys to CSC servers? In the case that there is not, and we continue to use GitHub Actions, I would imagine that the automated deployment runners would need SSH access to CSC servers in order to deploy the applications. Would this be possible to set up?

Apologies for the multiple, likely-complicated questions. If you would like to chat about this in-person, I would be happy to do so - just let me know.

Thanks, Chamath Wijesekera 4A Mechatronics Engineering, Honours, Co-operative Program University of Waterloo

[QuantumManiac]

CSC Syscom got back to us about this. TL;DR:

• Containerization is definitely possible. CSC can provide us with a Kubernetes namespace if we want to containerize our workloads and go that way
  • Caveat: not recommended if we want to use persistent volumes with our application. Not an issue now, maybe in the future?
• As Minerva requires API endpoints to operate, it won't work well with CSC's web servers (e.g. Caffiene). Should be fine to use with the general-use servers (w/ a process manager like pm2, I'd imagine) though.

[QuantumManiac]

Decided on using PM2 for now, as it doesn't require anything extra like containers in the case of docker and k8s would require. We can always easily switch over in the future.