ironic/doc/source/contributor/architecture.rst
Sam Betts 5647bfc246 Move doc/source/dev to doc/source/contributor
Change-Id: I6a3d143cff31348c62d8825f29f7484bafb9c8f0
2017-07-06 12:59:24 +01:00

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.. _architecture:
===================
System Architecture
===================
High Level description
======================
An Ironic deployment will be composed of the following components:
- An admin-only RESTful `API service`_, by which privileged users, such as
cloud operators and other services within the cloud control plane, may
interact with the managed bare metal servers.
- A `Conductor service`_, which does the bulk of the work. Functionality is
exposed via the `API service`_. The Conductor and API services communicate via
RPC.
- A Database and `DB API`_ for storing the state of the Conductor and Drivers.
- A Deployment Ramdisk or Deployment Agent, which provide control over the
hardware which is not available remotely to the Conductor. A ramdisk should be
built which contains one of these agents, eg. with `diskimage-builder`_.
This ramdisk can be booted on-demand.
- **NOTE:** The agent is never run inside a tenant instance.
.. _`architecture_drivers`:
Drivers
=======
The internal driver API provides a consistent interface between the
Conductor service and the driver implementations. A driver is defined by
a class inheriting from the `BaseDriver`_ class, defining certain interfaces;
each interface is an instance of the relevant driver module.
For example, a fake driver class might look like this::
class FakePower(base.PowerInterface):
def get_properties(self):
return {}
def validate(self, task):
pass
def get_power_state(self, task):
return states.NOSTATE
def set_power_state(self, task, power_state):
pass
def reboot(self, task):
pass
class FakeDriver(base.BaseDriver):
def __init__(self):
self.power = FakePower()
There are three categories of driver interfaces:
- `Core` interfaces provide the essential functionality for Ironic within
OpenStack, and may be depended upon by other services. All drivers
must implement these interfaces. The Core interfaces are `power` and `deploy`.
- `Standard` interfaces provide functionality beyond the needs of OpenStack,
but which have been standardized across all drivers and becomes part of
Ironic's API. If a driver implements this interface, it must adhere to the
standard. This is presented to encourage vendors to work together with the
Ironic project and implement common features in a consistent way, thus
reducing the burden on consumers of the API. The Standard interfaces are
`management`, `console`, `boot`, `inspect`, and `raid`.
- The `Vendor` interface allows an exemption to the API contract when a vendor
wishes to expose unique functionality provided by their hardware and is
unable to do so within the `Core` or `Standard` interfaces. In this case,
Ironic will merely relay the message from the API service to the appropriate
driver.
Driver-Specific Periodic Tasks
------------------------------
Drivers may run their own periodic tasks, i.e. actions run repeatedly after
a certain amount of time. Such a task is created by using the periodic_
decorator on an interface method. For example
::
from futurist import periodics
class FakePower(base.PowerInterface):
@periodics.periodic(spacing=42)
def task(self, manager, context):
pass # do something
Here the ``spacing`` argument is a period in seconds for a given periodic task.
For example 'spacing=5' means every 5 seconds.
Message Routing
===============
Each Conductor registers itself in the database upon start-up, and periodically
updates the timestamp of its record. Contained within this registration is a
list of the drivers which this Conductor instance supports. This allows all
services to maintain a consistent view of which Conductors and which drivers
are available at all times.
Based on their respective driver, all nodes are mapped across the set of
available Conductors using a `consistent hashing algorithm`_. Node-specific
tasks are dispatched from the API tier to the appropriate conductor using
conductor-specific RPC channels. As Conductor instances join or leave the
cluster, nodes may be remapped to different Conductors, thus triggering various
driver actions such as take-over or clean-up.
.. _API service: webapi.html
.. _BaseDriver: api/ironic.drivers.base.html#ironic.drivers.base.BaseDriver
.. _Conductor service: api/ironic.conductor.manager.html
.. _DB API: api/ironic.db.api.html
.. _diskimage-builder: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/diskimage-builder/
.. _consistent hashing algorithm: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tooz/tutorial/hashring.html
.. _periodic: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/futurist/api.html#futurist.periodics.periodic