Architecture and Deployment

Kyso can be installed on private servers or cloud instance, keeping your company's knowledge secure.

Components

Kyso is a Web Application organized as a set of services and applications packaged in containers prepared to be deployed and work together using a kubernetes cluster (the components could be deployed using other orchestration systems if required, but our current deployment system is focused on k8s).

Kyso Architecture

The two main components of the system are:

• kyso-api, NodeJS server that implements the backend functionality using internal and external services and provides a REST API to access it.

• kyso-front, the system's web user interface, developed using the NextJS framework, does its work calling the relevant API methods on behalf of the user.

Other support services used are:

• kyso-scs, module used to manage the reports storage and publication; it includes four sub-components that work together:

  • an internal ssh server to manage report files (it is accessed only by the API, users don't have direct access to it).

  • a web server that provides access to the files with access control (the access validation is managed by calling the API).

  • a Java application used to index the content of the reports and add the relevant information to the search engine database.

  • a Web server that allows us to run scripts with direct access to the filesystem for maintenance tasks and information retrieval.

• elasticsearch, search engine used to search and index comments, discussions and reports uploaded to the platform.

• mongodb, a database used to keep all the data related to the platform that is not inside the reports (i.e. configuration and user data, discussions and comments, etc.)

• nats, a message oriented middleware used by the API to emit messages related to different events that can be consumed by specialised micro-services

• onlyoffice-ds, online editor for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms and PDF reader used to display office formats from the frontend

Additionally the platform supports the deployment of optional message consumers (nats clients) that perform specialised tasks (send notifications using email or slack, display an activity feed, etc.)

Deployment system

Right now the recommended way of deploying Kyso is to use kitt (Kyso Internal Tool of Tools), a command line tool that includes support to configure and deploy third party components (i.e. mongodb, elasticsearch, …​) and our own services (kyso-api, kyso-front, kyso-scs, …​) on kubernetes clusters using helm and kubectl.

The tool is also capable of installing a cluster for testing purposes on a single Linux server (using k3d) and install and configure additional services on it or an existing kubernetes cluster.