The Evolving Architecture of a National Platform for Urban Research in Australia

The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN – www.aurin.org.au) is a national platform in Australia to support research into the urban and built environment. AURIN is supported through the federally funded National Collaboration Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) initiative. The AURIN project has now been running for over ten years. The web-based platform offers a single-sign on portal and associated Cloud-based e-Infrastructure that provides seamless/transparent and secure access to (at present) over 5,500 (typically definitive) data sets from 139 major organisations crossing government, industry and academia with a multitude of analytical tools reflecting best practice urban analytics. The AURIN project commenced in 2010, and in that time the platform has been accessed and used over 250,000 times. There has been increased user growth in the last few years and with it, expectations on the platform scaling to deal with this increased demand. To tackle this, the architecture and realization of the platform has evolved. This paper describes the evolution of the platform from the early prototype, to the production level system that has been running for many years and plans for the next generation of the platform through use of container technologies (Docker) and associated container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes for auto-scaling. The paper describes benchmarking experiments and results for one of the key AURIN components used for remote data access: a next generation data provider.