The past, present and future of the Vera Rubin Observatory Control System Middleware

TSTN-028

This technote gathers information about the history, current state and contemplates future evolutions of the Vera Rubin Observatory Control System (Rubin-OCS) Middleware. The middleware is the backbone of the Rubin-OCS. The highly distributed nature of the Rubin-OCS places tight constraints in terms of latency, availability and reliability for the middleware. Here we gather information to answer some common questions regarding technology choices, describe some of the in-house work done to obtain a stable system and document some of the concerns with the current state of the system, potential impacts for near-future/commissioning and future/operations. We also cover some of the work we have been doing to investigate alternative technologies and suggest some potential roadmaps for the future of the system.

Links:

• Publication URL: https://tstn-028.lsst.io
• Alternative editions: https://tstn-028.lsst.io/v
• GitHub repository: https://github.com/lsst-tstn/tstn-028
• Build system: https://github.com/lsst-tstn/tstn-028/actions/

Build this technical note

You can clone this repository and build the technote locally with Sphinx:

git clone https://github.com/lsst-tstn/tstn-028
cd tstn-028
pip install -r requirements.txt
make html

Note

In a Conda environment, pip install -r requirements.txt doesn't work as expected. Instead, pip install the packages listed in requirements.txt individually.

The built technote is located at _build/html/index.html.

Editing this technical note

You can edit the index.rst file, which is a reStructuredText document. The DM reStructuredText Style Guide is a good resource for how we write reStructuredText.

Remember that images and other types of assets should be stored in the _static/ directory of this repository. See _static/README.rst for more information.

The published technote at https://tstn-028.lsst.io will be automatically rebuilt whenever you push your changes to the main branch on GitHub.

Updating metadata

This technote's metadata is maintained in metadata.yaml. In this metadata you can edit the technote's title, authors, publication date, etc.. metadata.yaml is self-documenting with inline comments.

Using the bibliographies

The bibliography files in lsstbib/ are copies from lsst-texmf. You can update them to the current lsst-texmf versions with:

make refresh-bib

Add new bibliography items to the local.bib file in the root directory (and later add them to lsst-texmf).