This morning, I was having a conversation with a colleague about the UK federation’s
metadata publication system. We needed to reference the order of operations
and I remembered that I had once published an article about this system, along with a diagram
illustrating just the point under consideration.
Pulling up the article in question, I was slightly surprised to find that the
original article was published exactly ten years ago today.
The original architecture of this system was deliberately flexible, because we didn’t really
know for sure the environment we’d be operating in. It’s gratifying, therefore, to see
that the basic design has held up well enough that we can still use the article as
an informal reference.
In detail, of course, things are different now than we anticipated and the
deployed system has aspects which are simpler than a decade ago, as well as others
which have required some elaboration. At present, for example, eduGAIN has been
successful enough that it is currently the only active source of metadata other than that
registered by the UK federation itself. On the other side, we produce a number of
additional outputs today that we hadn’t really considered at the time, the most important
of those probably being that we now publish per-entity metadata as well as the
aggregate metadata illustrated.
Another major change – one that happened in 2013, about a year after the article
was published – was that we started publishing the tooling itself in a
GitHub repository for the benefit of other organisations working in
the same area. I remember the big challenge there being that the original repository
(which dated back to 2004) contained customer data; the version we published
had to be filtered using git filter-branch
for privacy (see the ukf-meta-meta
repository for the gory details). We’ve since rebased our development so that
our internal repository matches the published one except that we don’t expose
development work in progress. I’m really glad not to be reliant on filter-branch
any more, and I’m sure any reader who has dipped a toe into those waters
will sympathise.
Anyway: Happy birthday, helpful diagram!