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cloud.gov deployment of DASEES (Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society)
Citation:
Lin, J., T. Stockton, AND B. Dyson. cloud.gov deployment of DASEES (Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society). DDES Community of Practice Workshop, Durham, NC, August 14 - 16, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation describes the cloud.gov deployment of the Web-based decision support tool DASEES (Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society for the Development and Deployment of Environmental Software (DDES) Community of Practice (CoP) 2019 Workshop Conference. it helps address the environment of evolving needs and capabilities, declining resources, and increasing restrictions to build a sustainable, internal capacity for developing scientific software in support of the Agency’s mission. Meeting objectives: By the end of the meeting, participants will understand: • The need for a sustainable internal software-development capacity • What is necessary to achieve that internal capacity given current resource realities • Whether we can achieve that desired state ourselves through new tools and by training existing staff • What, if any, additional actions we would need to take in order to succeed. Proof of Concept: Can We Build an Internal Capacity with Currently Available Tools? Session 3: Cloud.gov 8:15 – 10:00 Session goal: To learn how EPA is using cloud.gov to host applications in production, to understand the criteria for an application to be hosted on cloud.gov, and to extract lessons learned in using cloud.gov.
Description:
DASEES is a web application for structured decision making written in JavaScript and PHP with a PostgreSQL database and utilizing an R service. We’ll talk about the process of deploying this application on cloud.gov and how it differs from deploying on an EPA server. Cloud.gov is a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry with built-in compliance for federal agencies. It combines a web-based dashboard with a command-line interface. With one command, cloud.gov creates or rebuilds the server environment and starts the application using the application code on your computer. The application is immediately available with a cloud.gov URL. This reduces server costs, setup, and maintenance. Instead of installing and maintaining additional software and servers, cloud.gov provides free and paid services such as PostgresSQL database instances and government agency identity provider, as well as the ability to build services from Docker images or Cloud Foundry Buildpacks. Using Cloud Foundry commands, Postgres and R (opencpu) services are “bound” to our DASEES application. We will discuss user authentication and share our experiences with upgrading to a prototyping space that allows you to work with team members.