Erez, I did not see an attachment or a link in your email.
--- Some thoughts about the relationship between contexts and conductor actions. 1. Contexts are very useful. Love it! 2. Conductor actions depend on managing contexts. So contexts and conductors are not orthogonal concerns. 3. Conductor actions make it possible to hide unnecessary context from an invoked action but preserve the context so it is still available downstream. So one can leverage conductor action for _some_ context management including managing a context stack in an invocation tree. 4. Conductor actions piggy back on the parameter object to manage contexts and rely on conventions about reserved parameter names. Having a separate context table (key/value pair) would have clear advantages. No disagreement here. :) 5. For conductor actions, we considered implementing a context separate from the parameter object but chickened out basically because it touches a lot of OpenWhisk components. This potentially affects all the runtimes, the messaging, the activation records, the payload and record sizes, the controller memory footprint, the quotas... 6. Conductor actions give the flexibility to customize the context management because we can write arbitrary action code to manage context propagation. Should we manage the context as a stack? Should it be flat? Should an asynchronous invocation preserve or drop the current context? It all depends on use cases. If the context becomes a pure runtime facility however, implicitly managed and propagated, we loose some of that flexibility. So we need to make sure that we identify and support all the important patterns beforehand (including obviously conductor action contexts). Cheers, Olivier From: "Erez Hadad" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Date: 12/05/2018 11:58 AM Subject: Shared Context in OpenWhisk Hi folks, Following today's call, here is the presentation. Note the additional implementation details in the "Backup" section. Please comment! Regards, -- Erez Erez Hadad, PhD Cloud System Technologies IBM Research - Haifa email: [email protected] phone: +972-4-829-6509
