WissKI Distillery -- User-Level Documentation
WissKI is a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for managing scholarly data and documenting our cultural heritage. A WissKI distillery makes WissKIs.
What is a WissKI Distillery and a WissKI Cloud
The WissKI Distillery is a set of scripts, tools, and applications that allows to operate a WissKI cloud of distinct but jointly managed WissKI instances, hosted on a dedicated hardware pool. Like the WissKI system, the WissKI Distillery is open source and free to use, it is developed in a community process on the FAU GitLab.
Why do we need a WissKI Distillery
WissKI is a complex system. It is based on multiple complex subsystems that are constantly being upgraded, supplied with security fixes, need to be backuped and kept in sync. Moreover, for collaborative projects WissKI must be hosted on a potent web server. Finally, installing a WissKI instance can be a daunting task, especially for persons without system administration experience and keeping it up-to-date (and thus safe from hacker attacks) involves a non-trivial time involvement.
In a WissKI cloud, repeating tasks like installation, update, backups and management of WissKI instances can be centrally handled and automated, server resources can be shared. This makes it attractive for organizations which run multiple WissKI instances (e.g. Universities or Museums) to centralize them in a WissKI cloud and thus lower the entry threshold for projects, relieve researchers and curators from sysadmin work, generally enhance the technical quality of the WissKI instances, and ensure archiving of the research data produced in the projects. Meanwhile, researchers remain in full control of the content of their respective WissKI instance as well as its individual costumization.
An example: The FAU WissKI Cloud
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg operates a WissKI cloud at https://wisski.data.fau.de (see details there). That serves as the reference deployment and drives the development for the WissKI Distillery.
Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) and IGSD e.V run WissKI clouds based on different technologies - GNM for internal use, IGSD offers WissKI hosting.
WissKI Distillery Functionality
The WissKI distillery is the central tool for system administrators of a WissKI cloud, not for end users. Thus the technical documentation in the GitLab README is the primary source of information.
We only give an overview here: in a nutshell, the distillery supports the following administration tasks
- Server Setup for initializing a WissKI Cloud.
- Provisioning a WissKI Instance for extending an existing WissKI Cloud with a new WissKI.
- Updating a WissKI Instance to new Drupal/WissKI/Module versions.
- Backup
- Cloud Information to see/monitor the current state of the WissKI cloud.