Download D6.32 - bivee

2 BIVEE ENVIRONMENT ARCHITECTURE
The BIVEE Environment is an inherently distributed architecture: the BIVEE Platform is a webbased portal, assembling together an array of web-based BIVEE Applications which leverage
different technologies and may run on different nodes of the hosting network.
The unifying elements are a centralized or federated (see section 4.2.3) authentication and
attribute release system, a standard user profiling schema, a portal-like container, a set of
Platform-level services and, to a lesser extent, a common look & feel across user interfaces.
Given this fabric, and the stateless nature of all back-end services in the BIVEE Environment both Platform-level and Application-level - cloud deployment is a viable option: with a
minimum of extra effort, any Application which is part of the Environment, as well as the
Platform itself, can be virtualized and installed on high-availability clusters.
The following deployment diagram illustrates this design with an example where each
subsystem runs on its own node. More complex, cloud-oriented setups are possible, with the
introduction of system-level facilities like load-balancers ad database clusters; however, these
scenarios are out of the scope of this document.
Figure 2 - Example deployment of a BIVEE Environment instance
In a distributed architecture such as the BIVEE Environment, where several different BIVEE
Applications need to cooperate in a seamless way, integration issues are of paramount
importance. The following subsections give an overview of how this objective was achieved,
with a focus on cross-application communications.
Page 10 of 76