The TDL technical teams held sprint reviews related to two ongoing projects this week: the Texas Learning Object Repository and the development of a Disaster Recovery Plan for TDL.
The development team demonstrated work completed during the twelfth sprint devoted to the Texas Learning Object Repository (TxLOR), a project to develop the technical infrastructure for a statewide repository for objects used in teaching and learning. During the sprint, the team added help boxes to the submission workflow aimed to provide additional information about the available metadata fields. The team also fixed three bugs in the system.
A second TDL technical team – the Installation, Configuration, and Management (ICM) team— completed a development sprint on November 8 in which they continued work evaluating backup and disaster recovery solutions for TDL services and data.
As a method of backing up TDL’s service platforms and member assets, the team has re-created many of the TDL’s scholarly communications platforms on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), an Internet-based service that provides computing power on demand, much in the same way an electricity grid operates. During the most recent sprint, the team developed methods for setting up Vireo and DSpace installation in EC2, along with a Shibboleth service provider. The team also documented the procedures for migrating all member services to EC2 from TDL hardware. The team will be backing up all services in accordance with this plan in advance of the planned move of the UT Austin data center to new facilities.
Additionally, the ICM team is evaluating other potential uses of cloud computing for TDL, such as the creation of sample environments to be used in TDL training courses.