Current Status

The DTaaS software platform is currently under development. Crucial system components are in place with ongoing development work focusing on increased automation and feature enhancement. The figure below shows the current status of the development work.

A C4 representation of the same diagram is also available.

User Security

There is authorization mechanisms in place for the react website and the Traefik gateway.

The react website component uses Gitlab for user authorization using OAuth protocol.

Gateway Authorization

The Traefik gateway has HTTP basic authorization enabled by default. This authorization on top of HTTPS connection can provide a good protection against unauthorized use.

Warning

Please note that HTTP basic authorization over insecure non-TLS is insecure.

There is also a possibility of using self-signed mTLS certificates. The current security functionality is based on signed Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates issued to users. The TLS certificate based mutual TLS (mTLS) authorization protocol provides better security than the usual username and password combination. The mTLS authorization takes place between the users browser and the platform gateway. The gateway federates all the backend services. The service discovery, load balancing, and health checks are carried by the gateway based on a dynamic reconfiguration mechanism.

Note

The mTLS is not enabled in the default install. Please use the scripts in ssl/ directory to generate the required certificates for users and Traefik gateway.

User Workspaces

All users have dedicated dockerized-workspaces. These docker-images are based on container images published by mltooling group.

Thus DT experts can develop DTs from existing DT components and share them with other users. A file server has been setup to act as a DT asset repository. Each user gets space to store private DT assets and also gets access to shared DT assets. Users can synchronize their private DT assets with external git repositories. In addition, the asset repository transparently gets mapped to user workspaces within which users can perform DT lifecycle operations. There is also a library microservice which in the long-run will replace the file server.

Users can run DTs in their workspaces and also permit remote access to other users. There is already shared access to internal and external services. With these two provisions, users can treat live DTs as service components in their own software systems.

Platform Services

There are four external services integrated with the DTaaS software platform. They are: InfluxDB, Grafana, RabbitMQ, MQTT, and MongoDB.

These services can be used by DTs and PTs for communication, storing and visualization of data. There can also be monitoring services setup based on these services.

Development Priorities

The development priorities for the DTaaS software development team are:

• DT Runner (API Interface to DT)
• Multi-user and microservice security
• Increased automation of installation procedures
• Upgrade software stack of user workspaces
• DT Configuration DSL ín the form of YAML schema
• UI for DT creation

Your contributions are highly welcome.

References

Font sources: fileformat