[ Back to Top ]
New Machine Setup
Setup should be easy. We can make it easy to bring a new machine into the cluster by having the Walrus daemon start in an "easy on" mode. This mode has no auth required, so that the cluster can basically "adopt" the machine.
So, in a nutshell, the admin's responsibility for bringing a new machine into the equation is to simply install the Walrus package. This will then boot up a Walrus daemon that will sit and wait for someone to connect to it. The daemon will be fully functional and will basically bootstrap the process by setting up the configuration file and then running it through.
Writing a Plugin
Cloud Stuff
Walrus needs to know how to talk to machines, so it potentially needs to understand clouds at the base level - i.e., not as part of any plugin. Should the inventory management plugin be base? No, that should still be a plugin, the base should just understand a very basic concept of clouds and systems so it can properly setup communication channels.
Once communications with the cloud is setup, and intra-clouds, then the plugins can do all sorts of fun things. Inventory management for example. But we definitely have to have all of the cloud logic base.
Communications
Two endpoints that are communicating with eachother... an RPC will basically be Question and Response. You send your question/command, they send the response. If you want to have a conversation, you have to have it in the form of multiple questions/answers.
Broadcasts are supported, as well as casting only to certain clouds, tags, etc. People can subscribe to broadcast notifications and generate them from within the plugins.
Everything should be done over HTTP. By extension, maybe we should speak JSON back and forth, so that writing a web interface is pretty easy. If the API supports authentication then that allows this to work really well.