Version 3 based on Dan's feedback.
- Lead paragraph is gone (in favour of the existing headline text)
- I kept the "system hardware details" in the inventory bullet due to
the point Ray mentioned - we don't currently support inventorying
arbitrary hardware, and I'd prefer to be up front about that.
- I expanded "execution environments" to "task execution
environments",
as we provision more than just the OS, we install Beah, set up various
environment variables, install task RPMs, run arbitrary kickstart
snippets, etc.
- final paragraph mostly replaced with Dan's suggested text.
- Retained explicit mention of Anaconda, as Beaker likely won't work
with SuSE (due to our reliance on kickstart, where SuSE uses autoyast)
- Retained explicit mention of Beah (now as a separate trailing
paragraph), as I want to start down the path to supporting other test
execution frameworks like STAF and autotest (as mentioned in Dan's email
last year about defining a harness API). Actually making that happen is
going to require that we draw a sharper distinction between
Beaker-the-lab-management-tool and Beah-the-task-execution-environment,
and the blurb is an easy place to start that process.
================================
With Beaker, users and administrators can:
- Manage systems across multiple labs
- Maintain an automated inventory of system hardware details
- Provision task execution environments on systems
- Schedule tasks to run on one or more systems
- Store and view task results
By focusing on different aspects of the service, Beaker can be used as a:
- test automation framework
- searchable machine inventory
- system provisioning engine
- task scheduler
- hardware lab management tool.
Beaker currently supports Anaconda and RPM-based Linux distributions,
including Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It supports a wide
variety of
hardware platforms, and can integrate with oVirt Engine for
dynamic VM provisioning.
Tasks are defined using the Beah task execution framework, a component
of Beaker.
================================
--
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Infrastructure Engineering & Development, Brisbane
Python Applications Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (
http://beaker-project.org/)
GlobalSync Development Lead (
http://pulpdist.readthedocs.org)