Ongoing architecture work

[Matthew Turk <matthewturk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

A couple of us have been working on deploying at NCSA a preliminary
architecture for the NDS, based around commonly available software and
with some homegrown development as well.  We've been taking notes
here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBRatAebX5-eQXB4qTFb5UGV0Cwy8Ppux_2RPs2ZUZY/edit#heading=h.b1qfdq9dlvv

(Please excuse the first person, that's all me...)

There are some action items in the document, and it's also able to be
commented on by anyone with the link, so feel free to do so.  Right
now, we're trying to stand up:

 * NDS Dashboard (IanT, do you want to chime in about this?)
 * Analysis launching (Kacper, feel free to share about this)
 * Authentication using first LDAP here at NCSA and soon InCommon
 * Storage backed by disk (frontend by iRODS), cloud storage (NCSA and
SDSC, fronted by SciDrive), and access to other providers (fronted by
ownCloud)
 * EZID DOI generation -- IanT has been exploring this, and we're
hoping to sync up with some folks from the UIUC library to understand
better the process and for some direct collaboration

There's some more going on as well, but I'm writing primarily to open
up what has been a somewhat insular discussion to the broader
community and to seek feedback, solicit engagement and to see where we
can take this together.  We're still in the process of getting code
online, but it will be hosted at either the bitbucket or github sites,
and we're keen to get people to explore, contribute feedback or
changes, and help out with conceptualizing.  Please don't take the
list above as "all inclusive"!

One principal goal is that whatever we develop is able to have new
components brought in with a minimum of fuss, components swapped out
with a similarly minimum of fuss, and that we aim to make something
that's (easily) deployable anywhere, not just at NCSA.

We're keen to get some feedback, either on the document, or here over email!

Thanks,

Matt