CESSDA Cloud Platform

CESSDA operates its Technical Infrastructure in a modern cloud environment, the CESSDA Cloud Platform. Containerisation and clustering technologies with Docker and Kubernetes form the basis for the microservice architecture.

CESSDA operates its infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform. The infrastructure is partitioned into development, staging and production environments. This ensures that its tools can be developed, maintained and deployed in a structured and scalable manner.

A Continuous Integration & Continous Testing approach is followed employing Helm to ensure reproducibility and reliability of the system. To facilitate a seamless development experience, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Selenium and SonarQube are used. Prometheus and Kibana form part of the monitoring framework to help ensure high availability of the tools provided by CESSDA.

Technical Guidelines

CESSDA maintains this set of procedures and guidance documents to help software developers design and develop tools for deployment on the Technical Infrastructure. 

The emphasis is on software quality, maintainability and reusability. The quality and acceptability criteria are defined by the CESSDA Software Maturity Levels and the EOSC Technology Readiness Levels (TRL).

Automated testing ensures that the Quality Standards are met by all deployed components.

Cooperation

CESSDA collaborates with many other infrastructures within the European Research Area on both formal and informal levels. CESSDA is a member of the EURISE Network, a collaboration to align on standards and best practises, education and training, and other aspects to ensure the sustainability of the technology supporting the infrastructure services. CLARIN, DARIAH and OPERAS are the other members of the EURISE Network.

CESSDA is also involved in co-designing and advancing the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) on a technical level. To this end, CESSDA is involved in a number of EC funded projects, in particular in EOSC Future and SSHOC.