A modern DevOps and serverless architecture for the New Robotic Telescope software infrastructure

Bento, João.; Heffernan, David; Quintana Rivero, César; Prieto Antúnez, Alberto; Garner, Adam; Copley, David; Fernández-Valdivia, J. J.; León Gil, Javier; Barrera Martín, Josué; Torres, Miguel
Bibliographical reference

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Conference Series

Advertised on:
7
2024
Number of authors
10
IAC number of authors
6
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
The forthcoming New Robotic Telescope, a collaboration between the UK and Spain, is poised to become the world's largest and fastest autonomous observatory, located in La Palma. It is tailored to be a premier 4m class follow-up facility for the imminent wave of time-domain and transient astrophysics. It exemplifies innovation with its use of serverless architectures and a unified DevOps methodology, integrating Docker and Kubernetes to facilitate reliable, scalable, and responsive deployments both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. This model not only aligns with modern web-based principles and distributed deployments but also ensures that astronomers and operations staff have unfettered access to manage their observations, data products and monitoring of the facility in a unified modern interface, setting a new standard for modern astronomical research facilities. Building on the Liverpool Telescope's autonomous robotic legacy, the New Robotic Telescope merges the GranTeCan Control System's framework with a novel Robotic Control System, facilitating the transition from human-operated to fully automated observatory functions. We describe the current status of the infrastructure for the New Robotic Telescope software stack, focusing on the current DevOps infrastructure and ongoing development, as well as outlining the future work ahead of the initial construction of the telescope.