Hello all.
Here's a revision of the 0.4.0 planning document that contains my
attempt to capture the many suggestions and comments thus far. I think
it's starting to look like a nice wish-list for a release, although I
want more detail on the Orchestrator bits.
Speaking of the whole Conductor/Orchestrator split. Mark and I got
very excited about this because it seemed like there would be room for
two smaller independent OSS projects there rather than one big hairy
one. I've heard privately from various people however that they
thought that split would leave Conductor as a not-all-that-interesting
piece by itself, concerned only with cloud resource allocation and
permissions (and some level of display of various things).
How do folks out there feel about this? Can we have some debate here,
please?
Oh, and please feel free to comment further on the revision below.
Thanks,
--Hugh
--
== Hugh Brock, hbrock(a)redhat.com ==
== Engineering Manager, Cloud BU ==
== Aeolus Project: Manage virtual infrastructure across clouds. ==
==
http://aeolusproject.org ==
"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m
not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
--Robert McCloskey
Conductor features:
* Authorization. We have a fair amount of authorization checking in
place, but no way to actually set who can do what. Given that a
central Conductor feature is the ability to control access to cloud
resources, this seems like an important feature. Things we'll need to
put this in place:
* UX around setting permissions
* UX around displaying appropriate "You can't do that" messages
where required, or showing/hiding controls as appropriate
* Good tests
* Not much model code -- I think it's all mostly in place. Correct
me if I'm wrong.
* Identity and encryption. Authorization doesn't do a lot of good if
anyone can bumble along and impersonate anyone else, so it would be
pretty nice to have at least a workaday identity and encryption
setup. Conversations with potential users have suggested the
following minimum features, feel free to suggest your own:
* Conductor will authenticate against an LDAP server. Since most
LDAP servers in the real world are Windows Active Directory, we
should probably include AD in the set of servers we test against.
* Fall back to local user data store, maybe? You can imagine needing
a local admin user that isn't in LDAP, for example
* Be able to proxy identity when talking to other things that need
to know it. Checking identity when saving things to/retrieving
things from Image Warehouse is the main requirement for this. I
think it's getting a GSSAPI library soon which should help. We
will also probably need this for Katello, when we get to talking
to it. FWIW Katello is currently using two-legged OAuth for this,
so I would think this would be the primary candidate for us too.
* A way to encrypt the traffic between Conductor, Deltacloud API,
Warehouse, and Katello. The obvious solution for this is ssl certs
that are created and signed by the installer, with some way to
update/revoke them.
* Admin UX work
* We need to give the pool, pool family, and provider management
screens the same loving treatment we have given the instance
management screens.
* We need to make sure self-service really is sane. A big part of
self service is image visibility -- i.e. who can launch what where
(VMWare's "Catalog" concept answers this requirement for them). A
good self-service solution is going to take thinking through some
use cases and some serious UX work as well.
* I'd really like to see a front door to the Conductor app. I'm
afraid to call it a "dashboard" because then it will never get
built :). I'd love suggestions for what should appear on such a
thing.
* Other UX work
* I think we should be able to launch single images from Conductor
without requiring a deployable XML.
* To facilitate launching single images, I think we need a UI that
shows the images that are available in the warehouse for the user
to launch. I also think we need a really, really easy way to
import existing images. I had proposed associating this UI with
pools in some way, since a pool is where you go to launch stuff,
but we need to work through the UX process to decide all that for
sure.
* We need to determine whether and how soon Katello will provide a
UI for defining images to build with Image Factory. If that UI is
a long way off, we should consider building a simple, serviceable
web UI that stands alone with Image Factory but could conceivably
be plugged into a common look-and-feel with Conductor. However I
don't advocate rushing into that unless there is a really strong
upstream need for such a thing.
* Status reporting
* We should reliably display the status of a running instance and
its uptime
* We should start thinking about how we will handle the richer data
about instance health that we will get once Matahari is in place,
and about the API we'll need to provide the Cloud Policy Engine so
it can tell Conductor about events it generates or handles.
* Users should be able to view an audit trail of events for an
instance or a set of instances
* Users should be able to export those events
* API
* We've been saying for a very long time that we need a real API for
managing Conductor and for doing instance stuff in Conductor. If
we admit that we have to manage instances that are not part of
deployments, then we can also just say that the Deltacloud API we
expose only works for instances. I think this is good enough for
the next release.
* We need to make sure the Image Factory API is callable by
Katello. This may mean resurrecting Connector, as I'm certain
Katello is going to prefer a REST API to the QMF one.
* Documentation
* I'd like to see the community get into the habit of creating or
updating wiki how-to pages as we go along. I'm not sure exactly
how to promote this (free beer once a month to the best new
page?), but I am fairly sure we do need to make the infrastructure
a little easier to deal with for it. Like it would be good if the
wiki didn't become unreachable a lot, the way the Redmine wiki
seems to do.
Infrastructure-around-Conductor features:
* Identity and encryption. In addition to the bits that go in
Conductor proper, there's going to be a lot of work in the installer
and in other projects nearby.
* Better self-monitoring. I'd like to see a quick shell command that
will give a meaningful report of the status of all the app
components.
* Way better logging and error reporting.
* All components should be using syslog if at all possible
* Logs should be timestamped
* We should not be logging credentials or things that are
potentially embarassing
* Components can be distributed across multiple machines
* RHEV-M 3.0 really works as a cloud provider.
"Orchestrator" features (even though these aren't yet separate
components, I've bracketed off stuff that concerns post-boot and
multi-instance operations as conceptually different topics to work on)
* Assemblies
* Users can define assemblies that cause the post-boot config
apparatus to install software and set config parameters on
instances when they check in after booting
* Investigate how much assembly config can be stuffed into user-data
without requiring config server, since we now have a working
userdata mechanism on the three cloud back ends we really care
about.
* Deployables and deployments
* Users can define deployables that contain multiple assemblies.
* Users can specify parameters that should be collected from a user
when the user launches the deployable.
* Users can direct that parameters collected from a user be
interpolated in arbitrary spots in the deployable descriptor.
* There is a UI for collecting parameters from the launching user
* There is a mechanism for passing all the assembly and deployable
config information through to the post-boot agent. (I think this
could use user-data, *or* a config server.)
* Authorization
* Should there be some way of restricting the assemblies/deployables
that a user can launch on particular hardware?