EaaSI Development Update - October 2022

Program Announcements
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Over the past month, ad hoc dev planning meetings (with Claire Fox transitioning to a full-time Digital Preservation Librarian role at Yale, this group now primarily consisted of Seth Anderson, Euan Cochrane, Ethan Gates, and Oleg Stobbe) to define the EaaSI platform’s “minimum viable product” for service launch continued, though personal capacity slowed our pace.

We aim to wrap up these conversations in the next week and use the various feedback and options discussed to update and release the EaaSI Development Roadmap in coming weeks.

  • Dev planning summary

    • Conversations were held regarding:
      • Incorporating emulated network functionality into EaaSI
      • incorporating Android emulation into EaaSI
      • status of R&D work on the UVI API (software “signature” → emulated environment mapping) and automated/“puppeteered” user actions (e.g. automated in-guest software installation, emulation-via-migration, etc.)
    • An additional RFC was drafted for:

  • Recent work accomplished (September - October 2022)

    • Implemented and merged fixes for issues with network initialization (including accessing the live internet) on latest EaaSI branches
    • Debugged problems with timeouts with embedding Public environments on an arbitrary HTML page
    • Researched latest advancements and possible improvements for hardware-accelerated graphics and emulated GPUs in resource-intensive environments (i.e. implementing QEMU + VirGL)
    • Debugged issues with custom object archive configurations
    • Debugged issues with failed sessions with objects attached from the “zero conf” (uploaded from user’s local storage) object archive
    • Merged improvements and fixes from past two months into the eaasi-installer dev branch for upcoming deployment tests and QC
    • Added “tooltip” functionality for labels on input fields in EaaSI UI (for added guidance/instructions)
    • Reviewed upcoming changes to GitLab service and reviewed options for GitLab->GitHub migration if necessary
    • Reviewed Sikuli integrations in EaaS R&D branches (automated/“puppeteered” user actions based on screenshots/OCR and keyboard input) for merging into latest EaaSI back-end code
    • Outlined changes to eaasi-installer that would be necessary for distributed cloud deployment of EaaSI with a static pool of worker machines

  • Forum tickets/bugs resolved

    • n/a

  • Expected work (October - November 2022)

    • continue drafting and discussing RFCs for proposed MVP functionality
    • Update EaaSI Development Roadmap
    • Deploy front-end/UI changes related to “advanced” Emulation Project workflow
    • Perform round of user-facing quality control and bug fixes related to Emulation Project updates and s3 storage improvements