SCHEDULE+VSTP

[Lawrence Job]

Hi all,

(Firstly thank you for being a valuable resource - I tried to pay it forward by contributing to the wiki but haven't been able to create an account.)

I've been consuming from the Darwin data feed and reading through correspondence from RDM. Until now I've been consuming timetable and reference data from s3 as per 'the old way', but it looks like that's going to be deprecated soon in favour of the RDM 'file transfer system' - in the next two months.

I am surprised that there's not been much chatter because this is a significant architectural change, and it depends on people either using AWS, Azure or Google Cloud or operating their own SFTP server to receive the files.

I personally am hosting my work on a different provider (which is S3 compatible but not AWS) so I guess I'm writing an SFTP service?

It looks like the architectural change affects:

• CIF files from SCHEDULE
• Timetable files from Darwin
• Reference data files from Darwin

... so composing my own reference data from SCHEDULE+VSTP isn't a workaround either. Forgive me for saying this, but if I understand the system correctly, it doesn't seem thought through. Researchers, and non-enterprise surely can't be expected to sign up to cloud providers just to receive these files?

Has everyone been able to migrate successfully? Is there something I've been misunderstanding in the documentation? 

Kind regards,

Lawrence Job