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On 10/14/2015 06:38 AM, Dmitry Tantsur wrote:
> Hi OoO'ers :)
> 
> It's going to be a long letter, fasten your seat-belts (and excuse my 
> bad, as usual, English)!
> 
> In RDO Manager we used to have a feature called advanced profiles 
> matching. It's still there in the documentation at 
> http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tripleo-docs/advanced_deployment/profile_matching.html 
> but the related code needed reworking and didn't quite make it upstream 
> yet. This mail is an attempt to restart the discussion on this topic.
> 
> Short explanation for those unaware of this feature: we used detailed 
> data from introspection (acquired using hardware-detect utility [1]) to 
> provide scheduling hints, which we called profiles. A profile is 
> essentially a flavor, but calculated using much more data. E.g. you 
> could sat that a profile "foo" will be assigned to nodes with 1024 <= 
> RAM <= 4096 and with GPU devices present (an artificial example). 
> Profile was put on an Ironic as a capability as a result of 
> introspection. Please read the documentation linked above for more details.
> 
> This feature had a bunch of problems with it, to name a few:
> 1. It didn't have an API
> 2. It required a user to modify files by hand to use it
> 3. It was tied to a pretty specific syntax of the hardware [1] library
> 
> So we decided to split this thing into 2 parts, which are of value one 
> their own:
> 
> 1. Pluggable introspection ramdisk - so that we don't force dependency 
> on hardware-detect on everyone.
> 2. User-defined introspection rules - some DSL that will allow a user to 
> define something like a specs file (see link above) via an API. The 
> outcome would be something, probably capabilit(y|ies) set on a node.
> 3. Scheduler helper - an utility that will take capabilities set by the 
> previous step, and turn them into exactly one profile to use.
> 
> Long story short, we got 1 and 2 implemented in appropriate projects 
> (ironic-python-agent and ironic-inspector) during the Liberty time 
> frame. Now it's time to figure out what we do in TripleO about this, namely:
> 
> 1. Do we need some standard way to define introspection rules for 
> TripleO? E.g. a JSON file like we have for ironic nodes?

Yes, please.

> 
> 2. Do we need a scheduler helper at all? We could use only capabilities 
> for scheduling, but then we can end up with the following situation: 
> node1 has capabilities C1 and C2, node2 has capability C1. First we 
> deploy a flavor with capability C1, it goes to node1. Then we deploy a 
> flavor with capability C2 and it fails, despite us having 2 correct 
> nodes initially. This is what state files were solving in [1] (again, 
> please refer to the documentation).

It sounds like the answer is yes.  If the existing scheduler can't
handle a valid use case then we need some sort of solution.

> 
> 3. If we need, where does it go? tripleo-common? Do we need an HTTP API 
> for it, or do we just do it in place where we need it? After all, it's a 
> pretty trivial manipulation with ironic nodes..

I think that would depend on what the helper ends up being.  I can't see
it needing a REST API, but presumably it will have to plug into Nova
somehow.  If it's something that would be generally useful (which it
sounds like it might be - Ironic capabilities aren't a TripleO-specific
thing), then it belongs in Nova itself IMHO.

> 
> 4. Finally, we need an option to tell introspection to use 
> python-hardware. I don't think it should be on by default, but it will 
> require rebuilding of IPA (due to a new dependency).

Can we not just build it in always, but only use it when desired?  Is
the one extra dependency that much of a burden?

> 
> Looking forward to your opinions.
> Dmitry.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/redhat-cip/hardware
> 
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