Add new page about federation #829

+
+One problem OpenSAFELY solves is that backends may present very different environments and databases: for example, TPP provides their data in a _Microsoft SQL Server_ database on a hardware server, and EMIS provides it via their _EXA_ analytic platform in the cloud.  OpenSAFELY tools hide these differences from researchers, so that their code can be run **everywhere**. After code is run on a backend, its outcomes are carefully checked for safety within the same secure perimeter, and finally released so that they can be **recombined**:
+
+```mermaid


thought: It's nice that you've used the built-in diagram support 👍

There might be others elsewhere in the docs that we can replace.

This does make a request to unpkg.com to retrieve the JavaScript which gives me two thoughts:

Might this be blocked for users if they are on a work IT network?

Are there privacy issues we care about? (Perhaps not: we already use Google Fonts.)

It is possible to host the JavaScript ourselves although we then need to manually keep it in sync.

I'm undecided, but worth a thought.

Blocking the request to unpkg.com means you just see the raw Mermaid source:

I've noticed an unpleasant FOUC type effect with mermaid; I wonder if hosting the javascript ourselves would solve this.

What do you think about the privacy plugin as a solution? I'm quite keen to pay for mkdocs given how much use we've made of it, anyway

docs/federation.md

StevenMaude · 2022-07-12T17:06:40Z

.pre-commit-config.yaml

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 default_language_version:
-  python: python3.10
+  python: python3.8


comment: I don't think this should change.

It's applied to the databuilder/ directory and I think this does want to use newer Python.

In the worst case, you can commit via git commit --no-verify, but maybe we need to look into this again. It's the mess of dealing with multiple Python versions in the same repository, unfortunately.

I did have a look at solving this in #832, but didn't get round to tidying that up yet. It's once again another issue that it would solve.

StevenMaude · 2022-07-12T17:08:11Z

I've added a couple of small comments for polish ✨ and I don't think the .pre-commit-config.yaml should change here.

But no issues with the actual written content which looks good 👍

render · 2022-07-19T07:54:11Z

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Also sync precommit version with .python-version, so I can commit it

render · 2022-07-21T15:03:08Z

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sebbacon force-pushed the federation-info branch from 84a6a00 to 6ea2716 Compare June 28, 2022 14:41

sebbacon force-pushed the federation-info branch 2 times, most recently from 6fef021 to 74ed3c5 Compare June 28, 2022 15:05

sebbacon force-pushed the federation-info branch from 0a3e7d1 to 6cfa071 Compare June 29, 2022 11:11

sebbacon requested a review from StevenMaude July 12, 2022 10:55

evansd approved these changes Jul 12, 2022

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