EAASI Software Product Management Updates

EAASI Research Alliance Software Roadmap Governance
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The EAASI software product roadmap is managed by Yale Library’s Software Preservation and Emulation (SPE) unit. As part of the launch of the EAASI Research Alliance and the overhaul of the EAASI software from a grant-funded R&D prototype to a maintainable platform, SPE has been investing significant effort into governance and transparency for EAASI as an open-source platform. This effort will be a work-in-progress throughout 2025. In alignment with this commitment to transparency, we will be sharing regular updates about the EAASI software product management and software development.

September 29, 2025 Update

  • Please stay tuned for announcements and invites for upcoming EAASI Product Roadmap listening sessions happening later this fall. These sessions are a core part of EAASI Product Roadmap governance:

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(check out more detail about the governance process in the EAASI User Forum)

  • Now that Notch8, SPN’s U.S. EAASI hosting partner, has EAASI 2010.10 up and running for U.S. SPN members, we’ve been collaborating with them on preparing infrastructure for their deployment of Next-Gen EAASI.

  • EAASI’s main developer, Oleg Stobbe, developed robust continuous integration automation that will be essential to making EAASI a maintainable and adoptable platform. He put this automation to work in the first release of Kubernetes Helm chart for the Next-Gen EAASI database. Notch8 is using these Helm charts to set up their Kubernetes infrastructure for deploying Next-Gen EAASI. Check out a view of Oleg’s in-progress work on our EAASI Issues GitHub board.

  • We invite you to follow EAASI development on GitHub:

    • EAASI Current Roadmap and Idea Backlog board:

      • The Current Roadmap tab shows what is being developed for Next-Gen EAASI.

      • The Idea Backlog tab shows known user stories that SPN members will vote on, and add to, as part of EAASI Roadmap governance activities later in 2025. These ideas from the backlog would be implemented after the release of Next-Gen EAASI. Prioritization and sequencing of these ideas will be informed by input from SPN members as part of EAASI Roadmap governance activities. The EAASI product management team at Yale will lead this SPN input and prioritization effort.

    • EAASI Issues board:

      • Specific GitHub Issues that are being, or will be, worked on as part of EAASI’s Current Roadmap.

      • Updated regularly.

      • Includes estimates and logs of time and effort (we’re experimenting with different estimation and tracking approaches, so this is a work in progress).

September 5, 2025 Update

  • Now that Notch8, SPN’s U.S. EAASI hosting partner, has EAASI 2010.10 up and running, we’ve been collaborating with them on preparing infrastructure for their deployment of Next-Gen EAASI.
  • EAASI’s main developer, Oleg Stobbe, continues to work on the Gateway API implementation, Kubernetes Helm charts, and continuous integration automation that will be used across Next-Gen EAASI. These activities are essential for making EAASI a maintainable platform and enabling more granular control over access to, and sharing of, emulation environments. Check out a view of Oleg’s in-progress work on our EAASI Issues GitHub board. Backend developer Artem Lobach continues to make progress on porting a legacy EAASI component to work with Kubernetes.
  • Please follow EAASI development on GitHub!
    • EAASI Current Roadmap and Idea Backlog board:

      • The Current Roadmap tab shows what is being developed for Next-Gen EAASI.

      • The Idea Backlog tab shows known user stories that SPN members will vote on, and add to, as part of EAASI Roadmap governance activities later in 2025. These ideas from the backlog would be implemented after the release of Next-Gen EAASI. Prioritization and sequencing of these ideas will be informed by input from SPN members as part of EAASI Roadmap governance activities. The EAASI product management team at Yale will lead this SPN input and prioritization effort.

    • EAASI Issues board:

      • Specific GitHub Issues that are being, or will be, worked on as part of EAASI’s Current Roadmap.

      • Updated regularly.

      • Includes estimates and logs of time and effort (we’re experimenting with different estimation and tracking approaches, so this is a work in progress).

July 30, 2025 Update

  • We’ve been collaborating with SPN’s U.S. EAASI hosting partner, Notch8, on provisioning their deployment of EAASI v2021.10 for SPN, which is now live and ready to use!

    We continue to work with Notch8 on Kubernetes planning and provisioning the OVH cloud infrastructure they’ll use for SPN’s deployment of Next-Gen EAASI.

  • We invite you to follow EAASI development on GitHub:

    • EAASI Current Roadmap and Idea Backlog board:
      • The Current Roadmap tab shows what is being developed for Next-Gen EAASI.
      • The Idea Backlog tab shows known user stories that SPN members will vote on, and add to, as part of EAASI Roadmap governance activities later in 2025. These ideas from the backlog would be implemented after the release of Next-Gen EAASI. Prioritization and sequencing of these ideas will be informed by input from SPN members as part of EAASI Roadmap governance activities. The EAASI product management team at Yale will lead this SPN input and prioritization effort.
    • EAASI Issues board:
      • Specific GitHub Issues that are being, or will be, worked on as part of EAASI’s Current Roadmap.
      • Updated regularly.
      • Includes estimates and logs of time and effort (we’re experimenting with different estimation and tracking approaches, so this is a work in progress).

  • EAASI’s main developer, Oleg Stobbe, has been working on the Gateway API implementation, Kubernetes Helm charts, and continuous integration automation that will be used across Next-Gen EAASI. These activities are essential for making EAASI a maintainable platform and enabling more granular control over access to, and sharing of, emulation environments. Check out a view of Oleg’s in-progress work on our EAASI Issues GitHub board. Backend developer Artem Lobach is making progress on porting a legacy EAASI component to work with Kubernetes.

  • We sunsetted the outdated and deprecated EAASI Open Source Sandbox that used to be accessible via the old SPN website.

June 2, 2025 Update

  • TL;DR – the new version of EAASI is taking longer than expected, but we are all eager to get started with Alliance activities. So Notch8 is going to deploy an earlier version of EAASI as an interim solution for SPN.

  • As we’ve described in previous updates, EAASI was originally created as an academic research project, with an emphasis on proof-of-concept demonstrations for many use cases over the past ten years.

  • Prompted by feedback from SPN members and the transition of the EAASI software from grant funding to ongoing funding by Yale, the EAASI software product management and development team made a major strategic pivot in July 2024 to implement the robust permissions and access control features SPN members needed for the virtual reading room use case.

  • Due to overwhelming technical debt that had accumulated throughout the existing EAASI codebase, implementing these permissions and access control features (or any other features the SPN community might desire in the future) required us to re-architect and rewrite the codebase to transform it from a fragile R&D prototype into a maintainable, reliable platform. There was simply no other way forward.

  • We knew this pivot would require a major, accelerated product management and development lift from the Yale Software Preservation and Emulation team and EAASI’s single backend developer and single frontend developer, so we brought in additional development resources and got more organized and transparent than ever, consolidating all EAASI code and project management into a publicly visible GitHub presence >> check it out! >>

  • Bringing additional developers to the team and building more robust, transparent project management practices will absolutely strengthen our work and produce net gains in efficiency in the mid-term. In the short term, however, these activities also increase complexity and require the investment of time in knowledge transfer, documentation, and building shared understanding.

  • All of us have been working as hard as we can over the past year, but we are behind: the new version of EAASI is not yet ready to be deployed for use by SPN.

    Because we’re all eager to kick off Alliance activities (Conversation Groups, training, roadmap input, etc.) and provide eligible SPN members with access to EAASI as soon as possible, the SPN Coordinating Committee voted for Notch8 to deploy an earlier version of EAASI temporarily until the new release is ready.

  • This version will be familiar to those who participated in the SPN hosted pilot of EAASI a few years ago. The biggest downside of this version is that there is currently no pathway to migrate data from it to the new version of EAASI. To minimize the impact of this downside, we are designing training and documentation to support users with applying the knowledge they glean from using this earlier version of EAASI to their use of the new version. There is so much we can all start learning and connecting with each other about, even in using this earlier version of EAASI.

  • We will continue to provide regular updates on the status of the new version in SPN Bytes and the EAASI User Forum, and we invite you to follow along with development progress in GitHub.

    We also look forward to discussing any questions that might be on your minds during an upcoming town hall.

May 20, 2025 Update

  • EAASI’s main developer, Oleg Stobbe, has been working overtime to produce the new components that are essential for making EAASI a maintainable platform and enabling more granular control over access to, and sharing of, emulation environments.
  • EAASI’s frontend developer Darya Romanchuk has overhauled the Teleport (EAASI user interface) code to align with our new branding, ported the code from GitLab to GitHub, and made progress using the new Typescript Software Development Kit that will enable the frontend to leverage the new EAASI API and backend.
  • In an effort to accelerate development on EAASI, we’ve contracted with backend developer Artem Lobach to work on porting a legacy EAASI component to work with Kubernetes. We’ve also contracted with Notch8 for developer Kiah Stroud to work on development of Helm charts for EAASI, leveraging Notch8’s Kubernetes expertise.
  • As part of our effort to consolidate code and project management for the EAASI software into a centralized GitHub organization (https://github.com/eaasi), we’ve been hard at work on setting up two GitHub Projects – one to document the EAASI Roadmap and Idea Backlog and another to make visible the upcoming and in-progress work that the EAASI development team is doing. We look forward to debuting these Projects in the next week or two – stay tuned for another Forum post.
  • We’ve been collaborating with SPN’s U.S. EAASI hosting partner, Notch8, on their plans for provisioning the OVH cloud infrastructure on which they will deploy EAASI for SPN.
  • Bringing additional developers to the team and building more robust, transparent project management practices will strengthen our work and produce net gains in efficiency in the mid-term. In the short term, however, these activities also increase complexity and require the investment of time in knowledge transfer, documentation, and building shared understanding. All of us have been working as hard as we can, but we will need to extend the timeline beyond the end of May for deploying EAASI for use by SPN. We are working on a strategy to provide SPN with access to EAASI as soon as possible. We will share more information as soon as that strategy is further defined and shared with SPN leadership.

April 30, 2025 Update

  • We’ve been hard at work consolidating code and project management for the EAASI software into a centralized GitHub organization (https://github.com/eaasi) where you can find repositories for the components that comprise the overhauled EAASI platform (for more background on the overhaul, see the April 7 2025 update below).
  • You’ll see that we’ve recently chosen some joyful names for the EAASI software components, inspired by what we love best about software preservation and emulation community and practice – themes of time-travel (Teleport), infrastructure (Superhighway and Onramp), and community gathering spaces (Speakeasy).
  • We’re particularly excited that the EAASI roadmap will soon be available on GitHub, which will make it much easier to follow along with development activities – stay tuned!
  • We’ve also been ramping up collaboration with SPN’s U.S. EAASI hosting partner, Notch8. As of now and barring unforeseen software development delays, we are still targeting late May for Notch8’s deployment of the new version of EAASI to be ready for use by U.S. EAASI Research Alliance participants.

April 7, 2025 Update

EAASI Software Overhaul for SPN: R&D Prototype to Maintainable Platform

  • 1:1 meetings with SPN Members in the lead up to the June 2024 vote revealed that the following are prerequisites for organizations to use a hosted deployment of EAASI:

    • Granular permissions and access control over which users can see which emulation environments
    • A stable platform that can be relied upon as a virtual reading room solution for software-dependent special collections and archives.

  • EAASI was originally created as an academic research project, with an emphasis on proof-of-concept demonstrations for many use cases over the past ten years.

  • Prompted by the SPN 1:1 feedback and the transition of the EAASI software from grant funding to ongoing funding by Yale, the EAASI software product management and development team made a major strategic pivot in July 2024 to:

    • Implement robust permissions and access control features
    • Re-architect and rewrite the codebase to transform it from a fragile R&D prototype to a maintainable, reliable platform focused on the virtual reading room use case.

  • The past nine months have required a major, accelerated product management and development lift from the Yale Software Preservation and Emulation team and EAASI’s single backend developer and single frontend developer to develop a largely new version of EAASI.

  • We have been investing significant effort into governance and transparency for EAASI as an open-source platform (this will be a work in progress throughout 2025):

    • Consolidating the code, roadmap, and issue-tracking into GitHub: https://github.com/eaasi
    • Applying clear rights and license information on the repositories (rights were ambiguous in the legacy codebase)
    • Introducing software product roadmap feedback mechanisms
    • Developing documentation for software hosting partners
    • Moving towards infrastructure for community code contribution down the line

  • Stay tuned for additional visibility into EAASI software development as we migrate our development project management to GitHub in the coming months.

SPN’S EAASI Research Alliance Hosted Instance of EAASI for U.S. Alliance Organizations

  • As of now, we are targeting May for Notch8’s deployment of this new version of EAASI to be ready for use by U.S. EAASI Research Alliance participants.
  • Stay tuned for regular updates about this timeline.

EAASI Documentation and Training

  • Active updates to the EAASI User Handbook will be moved to a private Read the Docs project, shared with Alliance participants.
  • Same content, adapted and expanded: e.g. workshop materials under construction for Yale staff by SPE unit will be templatized and added.
  • Some demonstration materials will be generated for public use.
  • EAASI User Forum adjustments:
    • Existing categories and sub-categories will be reshuffled into private Support and Discussion areas for individuals associated with EAASI Research Alliance
    • User groups will also be adjusted to accommodate the visibility and posting permissions, aligning with EAASI software product roadmap governance
    • No action required if you already have an account
    • Public announcement and general software/emulation chat categories will remain.
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