Colleges and Affiliated Institutions Advertising System (CAIAS)¶
This page gives an overview of the Colleges and Affiliated Institutions Advertising System (CAIAS), describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.
Danger
CAIAS uses technology, coding standards, and deployment methodologies which are not endorsed by the TDA and not standard practice for the DevOps team.
Service Description¶
Allows non-central institutions to advertise jobs on the central jobs.cam.ac.uk site, providing an admin UI which allows job adverts to be recorded and a REST API which allows these adverts to be fetched and displayed on jobs.cam.ac.uk under the category "College and affiliated institution jobs".
Service Status¶
CAIAS is currently live.
Contact¶
Technical queries and support should be directed to hr-systems-development@uis.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service. To ensure that you receive a response, always direct requests to hr-systems-development@uis.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.
Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be reported to servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk
Environments¶
CAIAS is currently deployed to the following environments:
| Name | URL |
|---|---|
| Production | https://caias.hr.apps.cam.ac.uk/ |
| Staging | https://webapp.test.caias.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ |
| Development | https://webapp.devel.caias.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ |
Source Code¶
The source code for CAIAS is spread over the following repositories:
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| Application Server | The source code for the main application server |
| Infrastructure Deployment | The Terraform infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP |
The source code for CAIAS has not been fully audited and does not follow existing DevOps practices, therefore it is only available to DevOps team members actively working on the project.
Technologies Used¶
The following gives an overview of the technologies CAIAS is built on.
| Category | Language | Framework(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Server | PHP | Symfony |
| DB | MySQL | pdo_mysql |
| Frontend | JavaScript | Bootstrap |
Operational documentation¶
Note
Information about the operation of the existing on-prem deployment is contained within the README.md of the web application.
The following gives an overview of how CAIAS will be deployed and maintained within GCP:
How and where CAIAS is deployed¶
Deployment is via our standard terraform deployment CI pipeline.
Deploying a new release¶
Making a new release of the application is done via release automation. In short: each commit to the web app's main branch builds and pushes a Docker image to GCR. An MR can then be raised within the infrastructure repository to deploy a given image by SHA. Once merged, the main GitLab pipeline will allow deployment to production via the "play" buttons in the CI pipeline. An automated deployment to staging will be completed as part of this pipeline.
Monitoring¶
Monitoring is configured as per our standard Google Cloud Run application module.
Access management¶
Access management is managed internally within the application, with the application holding a list of users and their permissions persisted within the application database.
Service Management¶
The service owner for CAIAS is Nick Stocks
The service manager for CAIAS is Andrew Crook
The tech lead for CAIAS is vacant until redevelopment can be completed.
The following engineers have operational experience with CAIAS and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: