FOLIO Project Update – Week of July 30, 2018

The FOLIO Product Council saw a proposed Quality Assurance dashboard. Members of Product and Technical councils were invited to make comments on mock-up pages. Shortfalls in capacity for the expected January 2019 Chalmers University limited deployment were presented. A follow-up will happen within the next few weeks.

All the backlog items are moving forward for the FOLIO Technical Council; this week, they focused discussions on capacity planning and the build/release management processes which has been under heavy reworking.

This week, the Metadata Management SIG focused on sorting options for Holdings and Item records. They discussed what the desired default behaviors might be, the need for manual sorting capabilities, and what would be critical for “going live”.

The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG worked towards a FOLIO NCIP module. Authentication will be handled via the Edge API, JIRA tickets will be refined as well. The Texas A&M team gave an overview of deployment with Kubernetes, Rancher, and Minikube. Pros and cons were outlined for Kubernetes with Rancher deployment, comparing them to other commonly used deployment tools, in particular Docker Swarm. Some advantages of Kubernetes and Rancher: Kubernetes supports “rolling upgrades” which means that services never need to go offline for upgrades. This eliminates the need for an additional continuous deployment tool. Rancher allows you to add new machines, load-balance multiple services and even more services from on-premise to Cloud deployment (manage hosts across different providers). This may not be the method of choice for all libraries, depending on their needs and intentions (e.g. on-premise vs. Cloud deployment). However this solution seems to be a method which will work in many cases.