Akvo platform overview

We are in the middle of making this less monolithic and will update this as soon as we can with better information on how you can use the Akvo developed tools.

Currently the best overview of the Akvo Platform is the blog posts we wrote about the platform.

Akvo is an open source effort. Our products are available under an open source license. We will also run our products as a service for the water and sanitation sector for a small usage fee.

Most of the software we use is open-source and is built by other teams.  The Akvo team works to integrate these software components into a cohesive, focused and robust platform. When we need software which doesn't exist, then we build it, as we did with Akvo RSR.

If you want to dive into the software development come over to the Akvo RSR pages on Github.com/akvo/akvo-rsr. There you can find our bug database, source code, translations of the software and more. Or go to the software development portal where you can get an overview of the resources and tools we use. Be aware that we haven't come very far yet, so lots of stuff is still missing. We are working on it.

Overview of the platform

The Akvo platform consists of a number of primary components. Starting from the bottom up, it is a traditional LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python/PHP. We do our own software development in Python/Django as much as we can, but we customise PHP applications using PHP when required.

Selection criteria for the software on the Akvo platform:

Open source – as far as possible customer facing applications and services should be open source licensed, preferably using the General Public License 2.0 or higher. This is so that it can be cheap/free and possible for others to replicate our efforts in other areas, such as healthcare, energy or agriculture for example.

Intel x86 hardware compatible – it is better if the software distributions are available as pre-compiled x86 binaries, as we don’t have time to be Linux compilation engineers as well.

Active support communities – Software platforms with active support communities are more interesting than those without.

The software shouldn’t suck – Speaks for itself. (A highly subjective assessment.)

Availability of modules and extensions – The less we have to do the better.