Compute Studio 1.3.0

Highlights:

Features Overview:

Compute Studio 1.3.0 adds new collaboration features for our Compute Studio users! Now you can easily share your public and private simulations with other users on Compute Studio, and you can now recognize collaborators as coauthors. While there are no limits to collaboration on public simulations, you will need to upgrade to Compute Studio Plus or Pro to have access to these collaboration features on private simulations. Upgrading is a great way to share your work privately with colleagues or clients.

This is just the start of the collaboration suite that we are building for Compute Studio. Please let us know how these features suit your work, and what else would help your collaboration with colleagues, clients, friends, and followers. This is an exciting release for the team, and finally offers the collaboration features that we’ve been planning for months. I’m very eager to hear your feedback.

Finally, if you’re a C/S user, I’d like to encourage you to check out our new subscriptions. Buying a subscription unlocks private collaboration for you and funds Compute Studio’s developers (like me) and the servers on which it runs.

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Engineering Process:

Thanks to the excellent tooling in the open-source ecosystem and Stripe’s easy-to-use API, the biggest challenge of creating collaboration features and multi-tier subscriptions was getting the design right. Like many other design decisions that we’ve had to make for Compute Studio, we looked to GitHub to see how they designed access levels for GitHub repositories. Essentially, GitHub lets you assign roles like “Read”, “Write”, and “Admin” for your repositories. The rules are:

If this was good enough for GitHub, then we decided it was good enough for us. Thanks to django-guardian the implementation process was easy once we decided on this role-based framework. django-guardian provides object-based (row-level) permissions for Django database models. Now, the owner of each simulation is assigned the admin role. The admin role allows you to edit the title, description, or inputs and assign roles to other users. For example, a simulation owner can assign the read role to another user on a private simulation, making it easy for to get feedback before sharing the simulation more broadly. A simulation admin can also invite coauthors to their simulation. Note that coauthors are automatically granted the read role.

During the development of these features a simple recipe emerged for adding role-based access to different aspects of a simulation:

  1. Isolate an action that can be taken on a simulation, such as being able to view it, and assign a permission for this action to a role. For example, assign “viewing a simulation” to the read role.
  2. Before letting a user perform this action, check if their role permits it. Do they at least have the read role? If not, throw an error.
  3. Write a test that ensures that users who are supposed to have the permission have it and can perform the action like being able to view a simulation.
  4. Write another test that ensures that users who are not supposed to have the permission don’t have it and cannot perform the action.

While Compute Studio is an open-source project and offers its core services for free, we have also adopted a market-based approach to sustaining and advancing our work. Like many other services such as GitHub, our new paid subscription plans on Compute Studio give you access to different levels of private collaboration. Our first offering provides four plans: C/S Free, C/S Plus, C/S Pro, and a forthcoming C/S Teams. C/S Free lets you do everything that you’ve always been able to do like run simulations, make them private or public, and now, add an unlimited number of collaborators on public simulations. However, by upgrading to C/S Plus, you can add one additional collaborator on private simulations, and by upgrading to C/S Pro, you can add an unlimited number of collaborators on private simulations. C/S Teams will make it easier for organizations to administer teams on Compute Studio. If you want to support Compute Studio’s development, upgrading to a paid plans, sending us your feedback, or sharing Compute Studio with others are the absolute best ways to do it.

On the implementation side, every time a user tries to add a collaborator on a private simulation the code checks if your plan allows you to add an additional collaborator. If the plan does not, then we gently nudge you to upgrade your subscription.

For everyone who has made it this far, I’d love to hear your feedback. What do you think of Compute Studio’s role-based permissions? Are you a C/S user or are you writing your own role-based permissions for another project? Let me know what you think at [email protected].