Basevi J1, McAdam T, Heerdegen A1, Turner C1
1ACCESS-NRI, , Australia
Biography:
Johanna is a Research Software Engineer for the Model Release Team at Australia’s Climate Simulator – National Research Infrastructure (ACCESS-NRI). She maintains the reporting infrastructure at ACCESS-NRI and contributes to tools used for running climate models. She has a background in Mathematics and Computer Science, and previously worked on backend, cloud-based microservice applications.
Abstract:
As publicly funded research infrastructure, demonstrating impact to funding bodies, partners and the broader research community is essential. At Australia’s Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI), this means reporting on the usage of supported climate models and tools. However, the data required is not always accessible on platforms we rely on, such as HPC systems and GitHub. Previously, data was logged via direct connections to multiple, un-versioned databases, which was fragile, difficult to maintain, and hard to grow.
This talk describes how what started as a simple API for ACCESS-NRI services to log data to a central database, evolved into a centralised reporting service built on Django, a mature Python web framework, hosted on the ARDC Research Nectar Cloud. Django's schema migration system eliminated the un-versioned database problem from day one, while its consistent app patterns and Python-native design enabled cross-team collaboration and incremental growth. Nectar provided managed databases, encrypted backups, and production and staging instances — without commercial cloud overhead or data sovereignty concerns.
The result is a flexible platform that continues to grow in scope — simple integrations allow an increasing number of services to send data, software tools can include hooks to report usage telemetry, and the system now supports organisational workflows such as capturing user agreement to licence terms. While public dashboards have been successfully implemented, building feature-rich interactive dashboards has proved challenging.
Attendees will gain a practical overview of the service architecture and lessons learned using Django and Nectar as a foundation for sustainable reporting infrastructure.
