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How the Admin Backend Provides Flexibility to IVAAP Customers

The P of IVAAP stands for Platform. As a platform, IVAAP is designed to be modified by INT’s own customers to meet their specific (and sometimes proprietary) needs. Over the years, most of the focus of my blog articles has been on the Data Backend. The Data Backend is the core component of IVAAP that accesses data and makes it available in a standardized form—the IVAAP viewer. The Data Backend is highly specialized for geoscience data. There is, however, another backend, the Admin Backend, that is more generic in nature and that typically doesn’t get as much attention. The goal of this article is to shed some light on how this “other backend” can be customized or consumed to meet customer needs.

Roles of the Admin Backend

The Admin Backend has multiple roles. Some see the Admin Backend as a component managing IVAAP projects. An IVAAP project is essentially an arbitrary grouping of datasets, where each dataset is accessible through the Data Backend. Indeed, the Admin Backend manages projects and all their members. Each member is identified by a URL and often carries metadata, such as its name or location. The actual storage of this information is a PostgreSQL database. The IVAAP Admin Backend provides a simple REST API to the UI to manage project data.

Describing the Admin Backend as a store for projects doesn’t do it justice. It also manages many types of IVAAP entities such as connectors, cloud services, users, groups, dashboards, templates, formulas, and queries. Other data types are geoscience-related, such as curve dictionaries. The Admin Backend is also in charge of providing an audit trail when data is added, updated, or removed. All these features are implemented based on a documented Java API so that INT’s customers can plug their own implementations. Developers are not limited by the REST services that the Admin provides, they can add their own. While the Admin SDK has multiple customization points, the use cases below are the most common.

Customization Use Cases

The first use case of the Admin SDK is the customization of authentication. By default, IVAAP supports two types of authentication. A simple OAUTH2-based authentication, and OpenID Connect. IVAAP customers often have their own authentication system, and IVAAP needs to use that system. To make this possible, the Admin SDK provides a way to customize how users are authenticated, and how sessions are managed and tracked.

The next use case is the customization of key services, typically collection services. For example, the Admin Backend has a service that lists all active users. This service is used by the UI when a template is shared with others. IVAAP customers can plug their own service that will list potential users, for example, listing them from an LDAP server instead of IVAAP’s own PostgreSQL database.

The third use case is the customization of entitlements. Each time a dataset is opened, the Admin Backend is queried to check whether the currently logged-in user has access to this dataset. The default implementation relies on group memberships, but customers can plug their own rules. These rules can be fine-grained, for example, making determinations at the well log levels instead of the well levels.

External Integration Use Cases

The integration of the Admin Backend with other systems goes beyond authentication. The Admin REST services are designed to be called either by a human or a computer. Unlike humans, computers can’t easily log in to a system that requires two-factor authentication. This is why the Admin provides a “Circle of Trust” REST API that allows computers to access its data without the need for a login or password, but rather by a secure exchange of keys. This feature opens new integration use cases.

The first use case for the “Circle of Trust” is the automated retrieval of user activities. Some INT customers require monitoring of user sessions to assess how much IVAAP is used. The REST API for listing user activities is straightforward to use and can be leveraged by a tool outside of IVAAP.

Another use case for the “Circle of Trust” is the automated registration of external workflows. INT customers might have hundreds of machine learning (ML) workflows that are hosted on various systems. With “Circle of Trust” credentials, the endpoints for these workflows can be registered automatically so that they appear as options to IVAAP users.

A Single SDK for Two Backends

The Admin Backend has about 200 REST services, and these services were developed with the same SDK as the Data Backend SDK. It’s the same INT developers who maintain the Data Backend that also maintains the Admin Backend, with no additional training required. It’s not just INT that benefits, but our customers benefit, too. Together, the Data Backend and the Admin Backend provide a unified experience for all Java developers customizing IVAAP servers.

Visit us online at int.com/ivaap for a preview of IVAAP or for a demo of INT’s other data visualization products. 

For more information, please visit int.flywheelstaging.com or contact us at intinfo@int.com.


In Retrospect: 10 Years at INT

This month of July marks a significant personal milestone since I have worked at INT for 10 years. 10 years is a long time, especially in technology where paradigm changes occur approximately every three years. Yes, the word “paradigm” was actually in vogue the year I started at INT—that’s how long it’s been. For this anniversary, I’d like to take you on a chronological tour of my experience.

The Formative Years

The first two years at INT were spent learning the many aspects of the application and the science I was working on: INTViewer and subsurface data. I liked joining a new team and getting acclimated to a new code base. I learned a lot from INTViewer’s architect. For example, he helped me understand the significance of making aspects pluggable. Not only does it serve INTViewer as a platform, but it allows the code to evolve without getting out of control. Following this principle, INTViewer’s code base has been able to grow several folds. And we’ll see that the plugins approach served me well in other projects over the course of 10 years.

Growing with INTViewer and INTGeoServer

After the first two years on the job, I picked up more responsibilities. Becoming the “ultimate resort for INTViewer questions” affected me in a way I didn’t anticipate. When I first started, whenever someone asked me a question I could not answer, my internal dialogue went something like, “I don’t know that part of the system. Who is the best person to ask for help on this?” After two years, this changed to: “I have been in this situation before. I know I will find the answer.” This somewhat irrational belief that I can answer any question thrown my way has helped me quite a bit when it comes to solving problems and helping others. When a coworker has a tough technical question, I didn’t anticipate I would one day answer, “Let’s find out!” with such confidence.

The needs of INT’s customers have changed over 10 years. One particular concern that has been pervasive across that time period is the ubiquity of data. Before “cloud” became the new word in vogue, customers often came to me with this problem: “I have teams all across the world, but I don’t want to maintain a worldwide file system. Visualization needs to be fast for all, without having to duplicate data. What do I do?” It’s out of these conversations that INTGeoServer, another pluggable platform, came to be.

INTViewer had years of experience built in to how to access data files efficiently, but, as a product, it needed to move beyond the file system. This was a complex technical challenge and an opportunity to widen the team’s technical skills.

INT gave me other opportunities to innovate: the integration of Python with INTViewer is quite unique in the market. Looking back, even though the technical solutions to reach “data ubiquity” have changed over the years, even though we introduced new ways to automate geoscience workflows, the fundamental work on geoscience data hasn’t evolved much. While software can be a scary place with its rate of change, I find that the geoscience learnings from my first two years are still relevant.

Building IVAAP and the Future of Ubiquitous Data

The latest evolution of ubiquitous data is cloud-based. The last three years have been a sort of new beginning for me since I’ve been tasked with leading the data side of IVAAP. Most of the IVAAP backend was essentially written from scratch, which is very satisfying as a developer. What is even more satisfying was working with the development team and seeing it grow. Since the backend was written by this team, there is no longer an “ultimate resort for questions” role. With the recent work with the OSDU consortium, I am happy and proud that the architectural decisions we made over the last three years have shown we are going in the right direction. This was recently validated by making IVAAP compatible with the OSDU platform. This work didn’t require any changes to IVAAP’s SDK—IVAAP’s OSDU implementation is actually just a plugin for this backend.

A Developer Culture

Working on INTViewer, INTGeoServer, and IVAAP for a grand total of 10 years, what has made me show up every morning has been the deep technical aspects of the job, the products I have been able to work on, and the people I interact with. INT has been a wonderful opportunity for me because of its technological leadership. If a developer says “I need X to achieve Y,” this gets immediate attention because the company culture is very developer-friendly. If you are a developer at heart like I am, being able to write code all day without interruptions is a significant perk of the job. Frankly speaking, these 10 years were also possible because developers at INT are seen as an investment, not a cost. Unlike other companies, INT has a strong will to weather tough economic cycles without shrinking its staff. I have grown with INT, and we both keep growing together (we are hiring, by the way). As a leader, I strive to help today’s new hires to have the same positive experience I had.