These first 6 months of the year 2022 have been quite busy. The CDS team focused on the development of InvenioRDM, the future research data management digital repository platform that will be the core of the future CDS version.
At the same time, production services need to be taken care of. While performing maintenance operations, we also worked on bug fixes and some technical features.
Future CDS platform – cds.cern.ch
With a small break of the development activities, we took half a day to discuss and define how we will kick off the new CDS platform: we came up with what we think will be a good strategy, and we hope to have the first dev/test instance by the end of the year, including a small subset of data migrated from the current CDS to the new one.
Even if it will be a long journey, we are very excited to get started!
InvenioRDM v9 and 9.1
The team contributed to the development of the latest 2 releases: InvenioRDM v9.0 and v9.1. These new releases enable curators to create their own communities of documents, to better self-organize content and make it easier for users to submit and find content. Each community is clearly identified, thanks to the new header with the name and the logo.
The way new documents are added to a community is managed via requests: when submitting a new document to a community, a new request is created where the submitted and the community’s curator can have a conversation with commenting. The request can be approved or rejected.
CDS Videos just got faster – videos.cern.ch
We have implemented a new feature in CDS Videos: the post-processing of uploaded videos got 2x faster! This is particularly visible when large video files are uploaded: the first two tasks, the extraction of the metadata, embedded in the video file, and the extraction of the video’s thumbnails now take half of the time.
Maintenance…
Databases for all the services have been upgraded to the latest versions, to ensure safety and security. The transcoding software, used in CDS Videos, have also been upgraded by our colleagues from the Webcast team, so that we can take advantage of the latest fixes and features.
On the 5th of July 2022, CDS suffered some slowness due to a very high amount of traffic, requesting some photos embedded in the CERN Home website. While being slower than normal conditions, the CDS website managed to serve more than a million requests, with a pick of 800 requests/second (thanks to connection queues).
While we are happy to see that our platform was up and running in such unusual conditions, we have identified some improvements, and we are working to change our infrastructure to be more performant when serving files.
What’s next
During summer, many absences are foreseen. The team will continue working on InvenioRDM v10: its features are critical to the future version of CDS. We are also planning to upgrade the web lectures player for an improved user experience when watching recorded talks, seminar or events.