Greetings, all! As of the new year, I'm funded to help out more with different bits of the Airavata project and the SGRC. One of the first things I'd like to look at is improving the installation process for the default PGA. After a meeting this morning, it seems there are a few options. I'd like to start moving on one of them pretty soon, but we thought some discussion would be helpful to see which way might be most useful.
Please take a look at these, and let me know any thoughts/feedback/preferences, or any useful experience with the tools mentioned! (They are in no particular order.) 1. Continue to use Ansible; develop a role that is as OS-agnostic as possible (can detect OS, dynamic inventory, etc.) There is already some work done in this direction, but is this the best place to spend my time? 2. Develop OS-specific packages - rpm, deb, something for mac (homebrew/port?) - nice from a "getting other people to host this" viewpoint, but that doesn't seem to be a huge sticking point. 3. Docker/Singularity? Puppet? Chef? Vagrant? Singularity might be better for other people in the research space. This would still require creating different container images for each OS. Does this cause any problems for database backups? Worth the time to get used to a new tool? 4. Should we be leveraging the tools available from Amazon more heavily? This might require a fundamental change in the PGA, but could possibly save a lot of work on our side. We don't know how much it could save, though. Cheers, Eric C.
