Merge "Devref: Document why conductor has a task api/manager"

doc/source/conductor.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+..
+      Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may
+      not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain
+      a copy of the License at
+
+          http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
+      Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+      distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
+      WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
+      License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations
+      under the License.
+
+
+Conductor as a place for orchestrating tasks
+============================================
+
+In addition to its roles as a database proxy and object backporter the
+conductor service also serves as a centralized place to manage the execution of
+workflows which involve the scheduler.  Rebuild, resize/migrate, and building
+an instance are managed here.  This was done in order to have a better
+separation of responsibilities between what compute nodes should handle and
+what the scheduler should handle, and to clean up the path of execution.
+Conductor was chosen because in order to query the scheduler in a synchronous
+manner it needed to happen after the API had returned a response otherwise API
+response times would increase.  And changing the scheduler call from
+asynchronous to synchronous helped to clean up the code.
+
+To illustrate this the old process for building an instance was:
+
+* API receives request to build an instance.
+
+* API sends an RPC cast to the scheduler to pick a compute.
+
+* Scheduler sends an RPC cast to the compute to build the instance, which
+  means the scheduler needs to be able to communicate with all computes.
+
+  * If the build succeeds it stops here.
+
+  * If the build fails then the compute decides if the max number of
+    scheduler retries has been hit.  If so the build stops there.
+
+    * If the build should be rescheduled the compute sends an RPC cast to the
+      scheduler in order to pick another compute.
+
+This was overly complicated and meant that the logic for
+scheduling/rescheduling was distributed throughout the code.  The answer to
+this was to change to process to be the following:
+
+* API receives request to build an instance.
+
+* API sends an RPC cast to the conductor to build an instance. (or runs
+  locally if conductor is configured to use local_mode)
+
+* Conductor sends an RPC call to the scheduler to pick a compute and waits
+  for the response.  If there is a scheduler fail it stops the build at the
+  conductor.
+
+* Conductor sends an RPC cast to the compute to build the instance.
+
+  * If the build succeeds it stops here.
+
+  * If the build fails then compute sends an RPC cast to conductor to build
+    an instance.  This is the same RPC message that was sent by the API.
+
+This new process means the scheduler only deals with scheduling, the compute
+only deals with building an instance, and the conductor manages the workflow.
+The code is now cleaner in the scheduler and computes.
+
+The resize/migrate process has not yet been fully converted to a style to take
+advantage of what conductor can provide so expect that this will change over
+time.

doc/source/index.rst

@@ -148,6 +148,7 @@ Open Development.
    hooks
    block_device_mapping
    addmethod.openstackapi
+   conductor
 
 Architecture Evolution Plans
 -----------------------------