Our Internal Systems
2020.07.17
In this first article, we will introduce how we operate our internal systems.
What kind of systems do you use in your daily work? Of course, there are many different types of business systems, but the following systems would be common to all of them.
- Attendance Management System
- Email System
- Document Management and Sharing System
We use these systems on a daily basis too. In addition, we chose open-source systems as much as possible for both cost reduction and system engineer training. The main applications we use are as follows.
| Name | Descriptions |
| OrangeHRM | HR and attendance management system. |
| ONLYOFFICE | Email, documentation, etc. It’s a kind of G Suite and MS Office alternative. |
| GitLab | git repository manager with unlimited users and repositories. |
| Confluence | Documentation and collaboration system. We mainly use it as knowledge bases. |
| Jitsi Meet | Online video conference system supporting recording. |
| Open LDAP | Employee basic information management. Mainly we use it as login credentials management for each application. |
| Open VPN | VPN server for remote workers. |
All of these systems are available to anyone, subject to the license terms. We have each of the above systems deployed and operated on computers located in our office.
System Operation Environment
We have three servers running constantly, each with a Linux OS installed. and all of these applications are run by these three servers.
Each system is running in a separate Docker or LXD container. As a result, it can avoid any dependency issues even though computational resource overhead is very small.
In addition to these systems, we have many containers running, including Nagios/Grafana for system/resource monitoring, Harbor for Docker image registry, development containers dedicated to each engineer, and containers for staging environment. On all three machines, which are about 300 USD, the CPU utilization is still less than 20% and memory utilization is always smaller than 60%.
For a Better Environment
The systems introduced here may be useful for companies that have just been established and are in the process of environmental maintenance, or for system engineers in charge of considering cost cutting, so we thought we would post this article.
At present, the above systems are operating stably without problems in our company. However, we are regularly researching and testing open source technologies to make them better. So, when we get useful information, we would like to post it in this Blog from each person in charge.
