On Oct 1, 2010, at 4:01 PM, Luke Kanies wrote: > On Oct 1, 2010, at 10:19 AM, Jeff McCune wrote: > >> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:08 AM, R.I.Pienaar <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Why do you consider REST preferable? We were talking about this last night >>> and I don't really see the advantage, we'd still have a REST server option >>> for smaller clients but I think for a big setup just avoid the HTTP. >> >> There are tons advantages I see to REST. >> >> We don't have to re-invent the wheel with REST. It's proven to work >> and to scale at a transport level. We get a lot of things "for free" >> with HTTP and REST including our choice of server, load balancers, SSL >> terminators, rewrite engines, inspection tools, testing tools, etc... >> >> We should also avoid having two different transport protocols for >> smaller clients and big setups. It's just more stuff to maintain. >> >> The puppet audience largely understands and has faith in HTTP. If >> need be, they don't need to learn another protocol to dive in and >> debug things with tcpdump and wireshark. > > I completely agree that there should continue to be REST support. My > question is whether there's significant value to keeping REST as the primary > communication mechanism, and if so, what is it?
I think so. Anything that is inter process communication would provide the value I mentioned above to the end users if the IPC calls are implemented over REST. Particularly when it comes to debugging, keeping track of state, scaling the service, and leveraging existing HTTP tooling and infrastructure. There's also widespread SSL support and well understood architecture designs that allow SSL offloading while passing through authentication tokens, much like we currently do with the certificate DN and verification status. I think SSL and REST has been a huge win in puppet and there should be a very compelling argument to switch the primary communication mechanism to something else. I don't think using REST as the primary communication mechanism is mutually exclusive with employing a bus, though perhaps I misunderstand the design. If we implement a bus, couldn't all of the puppet processes involved talk to that bus over REST? -Jeff -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-dev?hl=en.
