accomplishments
Digital payment system
As part of digital transformation strategy and to provide online payment services to the KFUPM community and students, KFUPM payment gateway service was implemented. This has helped several departments to automate manual payment verification processes and helped students avoid unnecessary visits to the banks and KFUPM administration offices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The solution designed and implemented is generic to include the use cases of API and non-API to serve the B2C payment needs of KFUPM. It was made robust by adding automated end-to-end and unit tests. Since the payment transactions are involved, special attention was paid to security and transnational consistency of records.
Another project to enable payment gateway services for business-to-business (B2B) is in progress. The objective of this project to automate financial business transaction of KFUPM.
Elastic Stack
We have been investing consistently to add elastic agents on VM’s operating systems and applications to collect logs and metrics. The result of this is observability that is helping developers and operations team to debug applications and to understand performance bottlenecks to improve services.
A project to implement KFUPM search engine to help community search and find indexable data is in progress. The enterprise search and app search features of elastic stack are capable enough to add search engine capabilities in any application or to create a full fledged independent search engine.
Virtual Machines to Containers with Docker and Kubernetes
To utilize the virtual machine’s and hardware resource effectively, solution delivery has laid out a plan to adopt containers technology using Kubernetes as container orchestration and management platform. The containers technology will also help in making the ICTC services more available and more capable of handing traffic spikes by making it possible do horizontal scaling. In addition to this, it will also help in gradually making the microservices architecture more mature.
DevOps Automation
Improved continuous delivery(CD) pipeline by automating the deployment process of static sites and wagtail based CMSs.
To improve the quality of the code and to help code reviewers, static code analysis tool, SonarQube will be used to perform code quality checks during the continuous integration(CI) pipeline. This will help the developers and code reviewers in improving the code quality for the maintenance.