Excerpts from Joshua Harlow's message of 2013-12-06 23:53:47 -0800: > Agreed, > > Chatting earlier today on #cloud-init about all of this I think scott > convinced me that maybe we (the joint we in the community at large) should > think about asking ourselves what do we really want a guest agent for/to do? > > If it's for software installation or user management then aren't puppet, > chef, juju (lots of others) good enough? >
Right those are system management agents. > If it's for tracking what a vm is doing, aren't there many existing tools for > this already (sounds like monitoring to me). > Right general purpose system monitoring is a solved problem. > Is there a good list of what people really want out of a guest agent > (something unique that only a guest agent can do/is best at). If there is one > and it was already posted, my fault (I am on my iPhone which is not best for > emails...) > So what is needed is domain specific command execution and segregation of capabilities. With a general purpose config tool like chef or puppet, doing MySQL backups or adding MySQL users isn't really what they do. One might say that this is more like what fabric or mcollective do. That is definitely closer to what is desired. However there is still a different desire that may not fit well with those tools. Those tools are meant to give administrators rights to things on the box. But what Trove wants is to give the trove agent the ability to add a given MySQL user, but not the ability to, for instance, read the records and pass them back to the trove service. Likewise, Hadoop needs to run hadoop jobs, but not have full SSH to the machine. While the _nova_ admin with root on compute nodes may have the ability to just peek in on VMs, there is value in keeping the Trove/Savanna/Heat admins segregated from that. So basically there is a need for structure that general purpose tools may not have. I admit though, it seems like that would be something other tools outside of OpenStack would want as well. _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev