ARI&Snet Technical Manual

Welcome to the technical manual for ARI&Snet, a shared infrastructure for administration and research tools in academia in Austria.

A quick overview

ARI&Snet is built in OpenShift, a Kubernetes distribution, on a cloud platform hosted in Austria. The infrastructure is maintained by TU Wien on behalf of all participating universities.

ARI&Snet is connected to eduID/eduGAIN, allowing members of other institutions to log in to applications.

This infrastructure is meant for collaborative projects between universities. One or more universities offer their services to other Austrian universities in the area of academic research or administration and ARI&Snet provides the hosting infrastructure.

Getting access

If you would like to operate a service on ARI&Snet, you must either be a member of a participating Austrian institution or partner with one.

Participating Institutions

• TU Wien
• TU Graz
• Universität Wien
• Universität Klagenfurt
• Universität Innsbruck
• Universität Graz
• Universität Salzburg
• Johannes-Kepler-Universität Linz
• Medizinische Universität Graz
• Medizinische Universität Innsbruck
• Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
• Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
• Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien
• VetMed Uni Wien
• FWF
• FFG
• WWTF
• Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

Please note that ARI&Snet does not operate your software. You are responsible for deploying and maintaining it, as well as for its security. ARI&Snet only provides the platform to deploy on. You will need people to work on your service and perform regular maintenance. Depending on the complexity and number of components of your service, the work required typically ranges from 1-2 hours per month for simple applications to requiring a full workday per week for more complex ones. (These numbers are only guidelines and do not include the software development work, only the work required for ARI&Snet.)

Applications offered to other institutions on ARI&Snet must fulfill at least the following minimum criteria:

• The software must be properly licensed. (For example, if you offer a commercial software to all students of Austria, you may have to purchase a seat license for all students, even if they never log in. Similarly, if you offer an AGPL-licensed software with customizations, you must make the source code available to your users under the AGPL license.)
• The software must be actively developed/maintained and you must apply security updates regularly. (Security updates must be made for the software, as well as the underlying container image.)
• ARI&Snet only provides the Kubernetes/OpenShift platform. You must provide a technical contact person who operates the components of your service. This person must be reachable within a reasonable time and is responsible for deploying your application, running databases, creating backups and applying security updates regularly. (We strongly recommend having more than one knowledgeable person to account for absences.)
• You are responsible for ensuring legal compliance of your service (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, "Impressumspflicht", etc.)

The ARI&Snet service is offered at no cost to your institution as long as your application fits within reasonable resource limits. Should you need excessive amounts of storage (over ~1 TB S3, over ~50 GB volume), RAM (over ~8-10 GB) or CPU (over ~2-4 cores), please contact us so we can find a cost-effective solution for your needs.

Developer support

To ensure speedy communication, we offer a dedicated developer support channel on Matrix for every application. This is a low-noise channel for communication with our technical staff about any technical development issues you may be facing with the ARI&Snet deployment. You can ask us about anything related to Kubernetes, ARI&Snet, or software architecture there.

First steps

Once you have access to the cluster, please head over to the Getting Started guide for your first steps with the ARI&Snet cluster. For a quick introduction to Kubernetes, please read our Kubernetes primer.