Rubin Science Platform: Deployment Assessment

The Rubin Science Platform (RSP) offers a modular framework in which SAP components can be developed, deployed and managed. A predominantly K8s-based deployment, the RSP dev team are prioritising modularity, reusability and use of existing off-the-shelf components (several of the CNCF-backed projects for instance). Therefore, though the needs of the SRCNet are likely to differ in several ways from Rubin and its (I)DACs, it is probable that the core underlying infrastructure will be suitable for both projects' SAP needs. Other factors to consider are the collaboration agreement between SKAO and Rubin Observatory, connections to ESCAPE collaborators involved in RSP operations, and SRCNet partners (e.g. CADC) who will be operating RSP deployments to support Rubin users in the future. RSP has also been tested with the same images developed for the CANFAR science platform user sessions, offers an existing collection of IVOA-compliant services using the FastAPI framework, and the Rubin Observatory is using Rucio and PANDA to serve the needs of the Observatory's data distribution and workload management systems (though it should be noted that these are not currently coupled to the RSP itself). With all this in mind, RSP seems worth some further evaluation as a component (likely platform-level) of the SKAO SAP.