Workflow for Conductor

Hugh O. Brock hbrock at redhat.com
Tue Jul 10 19:24:14 UTC 2012


On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 02:18:46PM -0400, Andy Goldstein wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> First off, sorry for not replying to the posts from before - I just now joined this mailing list.  I wanted to propose an idea for a way to implement workflow/approvals for launching new instances.  I know there is currently a proposal along these lines (https://www.aeolusproject.org/redmine/projects/aeolus/wiki/Launch_requests_blocking_on_approval).  Looking at that, I see the suggestion is to build all the approval directly into Conductor.  What I'm thinking about instead is sending out a message (e.g. Qpid, HornetQ, ActiveMQ) with the launch request information.  Conductor wouldn't be responsible for managing the workflow other than keeping track of PENDING_APPROVAL deployments.  Instead, the workflow would be managed by an external third-party system.  I suppose Conductor could supply a default/minimal approval UI, but the real power is in making the workflow extensible.  Imagine a large enterprise IT department that hooks up the workflow notifications to a business rules engine for more advanced approval logic.
> 
> (As an aside, a similar approach could be used for events such as instance started, instance stopped, etc.  Other external systems could consume these events to provide services like billing/chargebacks that wouldn't necessarily need to be features of Aeolus.)
> 
> What do you all think?

Andy, what if we simply provided a hook or a set of hooks around the
launch workflow? IOW we give you a way to specify a script to run at a
particular stage in the workflow, and an API to indicate that the hook
has passed? You could then put whatever messaging setup in front of
that that you wanted and Conductor itself wouldn't have to know
anything about it...

--Hugh

-- 
== Hugh Brock, hbrock at 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



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