Fosscomm 2022

Operating Digital Public Services with OSS
2022-11-19, 13:30–14:15 (Europe/Athens), Room II

For the past three years GRNET has developed an infrastructure for gov.gr horizontal services including the gov.gr portal and gov wallet among others. To deploy and run such services, GRNET teams employ a CI/CD, cloud-native approach that involves an enabling environment for integrating open-source software components. In this context, DevOps can address reliability and security challenges by incorporating suitable tools such as scalability mechanisms and firewalls. In this talk we will present GRNET's approach to operate digital services and highlight the usage of open-source software through a number of real-world examples.


We will present how GRNET uses open-source software components to deploy, operate and monitor digital public services on the organization's infrastructure (>12 rack servers with TB of storage). Such components include Kubernetes, a well-established container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling and management, PgBouncer, a connection pooler for PostgreSQL, ModSecurity, a Web application firewall and more. We will highlight the significance of each component through a number of use cases.

Dimitris Mitropoulos is the Head of the Reliability Engineering Directorate at the Greek National Infrastructures for Research and Technology (GRNET) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Athens. Previously, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Computer Science Department of Columbia University. Dimitris holds a PhD in Computer Security from the Athens University of Economics and Business and has been involved in several EU and US funded R&D projects. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.