Dimitris Mitropoulos, National Infrastructures for Research and Technology – GRNET and University of Athens; Alex Kiousis, National Infrastructures for Research and Technology – GRNET
GRNET is Greece's National Infrastructures for Research and Technology (NREN) organisation, which acts as a network and services provider for research and education communities. Since 2019, GRNET is responsible for the development, operation and maintenance of several governmental services, thus playing an important role in Greece's digital transformation. To address the different challenges related to this role, GRNET teams developed AppStack, a cloud-native platform, based on production-ready open source software, for running government-related services such as the gov.gr portal, the electronic issuance of documents signed by the Greek state, and gov wallet, among others.
AppStack provides an environment for integrating open-source and in-house software components, where DevOps can incorporate suitable tools to tackle scalability and security issues.
Currently, AppStack hosts workloads that serve more than 8 million Greek citizens, are able to handle more than 20K requests per second, and can generate hundreds of digital documents signed by the Greek state per second.
In this talk we will present AppStack, its numerous components, and how open source made it possible. Finally, we will describe some key experiences from production.
Dimitris Mitropoulos, National Infrastructures for Research and Technology – GRNET and University of Athens
Dimitris Mitropoulos is an Assistant Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Head of Reliability Engineering at the Greek National Infrastructures for Research and Technology (GRNET). Previously, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science Department of Columbia University. Dimitris holds a PhD in Software Security from the Athens University of Economics and Business and has been involved in several EU and US funded R&D projects. His research interests include software engineering and computer security. He is a member of ACM, IEEE and USENIX.
Alex Kiousis, National Infrastructures for Research and Technology – GRNET
Alex Kiousis is a Site Reliability Engineer in GRNET in Greece. His team handles GRNET's on-premise infrastructure and services, delivering GRNET's custom Cloud service to Greece's Research and Academic communities and several user-facing Government-related Digital Transformation Web services.
author = {Dimitris Mitropoulos and Alex Kiousis},
title = {{AppStack}: An Open Source Cloud Native Platform for Running Digital Public Services},
year = {2024},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
