perMIT Findings

1. Background

The perMIT project aims to translate MIT's RolesDB, in production use for over 10 years, to an open source community project.  Once completed, perMIT could be dropped in place of the MIT Roles DB without disrupting existing applications, systems, and services.

2. Findings

1. High Availability
   In order to meet current developer and user expectations of 24x7 operations, it is important for services providing web interfaces to be highly available.  To assure that perMIT meets these needs, high availability should be added to the project's scope, making it a priority for release.  MIT could benefit from learning more about the development and operations of highly availale services, and perMIT could be a good area of exploration.
2. Financial Concerns
   In light of the current economic climate, and the Institute's budget reductions, further MIT specific justifications are needed.  Though supporting open source and contributing code back to the larger community is important, it may no longer be a compelling project driver in and of itself.
3. Review Current
   To meet the goal of creating a drop-in replacement for the RolesDB, a fuller understanding of its current use is needed.  In particular, reviewing how current RolesDB clients are using Oracle Clients to directly access the database.

3. Recommendation from the TAP Consultation