Rapid deployment for federation – just AASC 

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) currently comprises 116 service providers. Growth in the number of service providers has been reasonably constant over time and is expected to keep growing in the foreseeable future. The software that underpins service providers is complex and the service provider installation process can prove problematic for service administrators. Everybody is busy. Service administrators want a plug and play solution for authentication. The AAF has a very small team of technical support staff who must balance competing priorities, such as support, and operational and project work. 

This poses a number of challenges: 

• How can we improve the service provider installation process for service administrators? 
• How can we reduce the number of support calls related to service provider installations? 
• How can we reduce operational workload for the AAF technical team? 
• How can we easily include support for different types and versions of service software in future? 
• How can we make an extensible framework that can be extended in future e.g. to include identity provider installation? 

To address these challenges we developed a tool in-house that we call AASC (AAF Automated Software Configurator). 

In this presentation we will: 

• Conduct a deep dive into the software and infrastructure behind AASC. 
• Look at “before and after” snapshots for AASC to show how it has dramatically improved service provider deployment. 
• Look at the future road map for AASC to show how we are looking to extend the tool for more improvements to federation software deployment.