Virtualisation has played an important role in the Digital Repository of Ireland's (DRI) development. Initially automation and virtualisation tools were used for automated and repeatable deployment of development environments to developer workstations. This was important to ensure a consistent environment within a distributed development team and also to assist new members joining the team. Later with the project's hardware infrastructure in place, a private cloud system was deployed and these same tools were re-used to create a continuous integration and test system. Now this same approach is used to deploy and manage the complete stack of our production repository.

DRI maintains three separate instances of the Repository stack: test, training and production. Furthermore these instances are geographically distributed, with two instances located in a data centre in Maynooth University and the production instance at Trinity College Dublin. A continuous integration process as part of the development workflow automatically deploys the test instance.

Whereas the production instance is only deployed once a new release of the Repository has been prepared and fully tested. Managing and maintaining this distributed infrastructure and deployment process with a limited number of staff has only been made possible through high levels of automation and virtualisation.

This talk will cover DRI's use of private cloud and automated deployments in its development and production workflows.

If you require information about any aspect of the conference please contact: Fi Coyle: fi.coyle@heanet.ie / +353 1 6609040