Sustainability in the Tapis Framework

As more research depends fundamentally on software, sustainability becomes increasingly critical. Nevertheless, despite valiant efforts from a growing number of researchers and practitioners, a basic understanding of best-practices for sustainable software remains elusive. In this paper, we review the specific practices and strategies that have helped to sustain Tapis, a cyberinfastructure project that has been in use for over a decade. The Tapis framework is an open-source, software-as-a-service Application Programming Interface (API) for collaborative, automated, reproducible, computational research which began as the Foundation API for the iPlant Collaborative Project in 2008. Today Tapis is used by tens of thousands of individuals across more than a dozen active projects. This paper describes our multi-faceted approach to sustaining an increasingly complex ecosystem of software, documentation and other digital assets, including both technical and organizational strategies for minimizing the cost of sustainment while maximizing available resources for sustainment activities.