Integrated Reward System (IRS)¶
This page gives an overview of the Integrated Reward System (IRS), describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.
Service Description¶
The Integrated Reward System allows staff to apply for rewards, and allows HR and departmental staff to administrate the reward process, including collecting references and scoring applications.
The only reward scheme implemented so far is Academic Career Pathways: Research and Teaching (ACP R&T, formerly just ACP, formerly Senior Academic Promotions / SAP), which allows senior academics to apply for promotion.
The Referee Portal and Referee Admin Console components of the system have been used in the past to support another reward scheme, Professorial Pay Review (PPR), but PPR has never been fully supported by IRS.
While the original vision was to have all reward schemes implemented in IRS, the current thinking is that others may or may not be a good fit, depending on their similarity to ACP. This will need to be analysed before adding any additional schemes.
Service Status¶
IRS is a live service, and is used each year for that ACP round. ACP (as in the business process) runs every year. Demand on the system fluctuates throughout the year according to where we are in the cycle.
The live service is currently an on-prem service, but is being migrated by the DevOps team to run in GCP.
environments can be found on Confluence: [https://uniofcam.atlassian.net/wiki/x/UYzV], until those environments are decommissioned.
Contact¶
Technical queries and support should be directed to servicedesk@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 servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.
Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues here.
Environments¶
IRS is currently deployed to the following environments:
| Name | Main Application URL | Admin URL |
|---|---|---|
| Production | TBA | TBA |
| Staging | https://webapp.test.irs.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ | https://webapp.test.irs.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/admin |
| Development | https://webapp.devel.irs.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/ | https://webapp.devel.irs.gcp.uis.cam.ac.uk/admin |
The GCP console pages for managing the infrastructure of each component of the deployment are:
| Name | Main Application Hosting | Database |
|---|---|---|
| Production | GCP Cloud Run | GCP Cloud SQL (Postgres) |
| Staging | GCP Cloud Run | GCP Cloud SQL (Postgres) |
| Development | GCP Cloud Run | GCP Cloud SQL (Postgres) |
All environments share access to a set of secrets stored in the meta-project Secret Manager.
Source code¶
Source code for Integrated Reward System is spread over the following repositories:
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| IRS parent project¹ | Parent repo supporting development of complete system |
| Integrated Reward System¹ | The Applicant Portal and Admin Console web-apps. Most of the business logic is here. |
| Referee¹ | The Referee Portal (and Referee Admin Portal, which is only used for PPR) |
| Orchestra¹ | Core backend component. Data repository and API. Implements some business logic. |
| Panel¹ | Microservice where details of the committees who score applications, including members of the committees, are maintained |
| Cloud Infrastructure¹ | Terraform configuration for infrastructure and deployment |
¹ DevOps only
Technologies used¶
The following gives an overview of the technologies that Integrated Reward System is built on.
| Category | Language | Framework(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Web Apps and Web Services | Java 8 | TomEE Plume, CDI, JAX/RS, JSF, Primefaces |
| DB | PostgreSQL 13, MongoDB 4.2, (Also connects to external Oracle HR database) | |
| GCP deployment | Terraform |
Operational documentation¶
The following gives an overview of how Integrated Reward System is deployed and maintained.
How and where Integrated Reward System is deployed¶
- The Database for WHAT? data is a PostgreSQL database hosted by GCP Cloud SQL.
- The main web application is a Java application hosted by GCP in tomee container on Cloud Run.
Deploying a new release¶
The README.md file in the Infrastructure Deployment repository explains how to deploy Integrated Reward System.
Monitoring¶
Monitoring will be provided after project has been migrated to GCP
- GCP Cloud Monitoring for tracking the health of applications in the environments and sending alert emails when problems are detected.
- Cloud Logs for tracking individual requests/responses to/from the web application and the
synchronisation job application.
- production,
- staging
- development
Debugging¶
The README.md files in each of the source code repositories provide information about debugging both local and deployed instances of the applications.
Service Management and tech lead¶
The service owner for Integrated Reward System is TBA
The service manager and tech lead for Integrated Reward System is TBA
The following engineers have operational experience with Integrated Reward System and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: