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Services, Managers and Drivers
The responsibilities of Services, Managers, and Drivers, can be a bit confusing to people that are new to nova. This document attempts to outline the division of responsibilities to make understanding the system a little bit easier.
Currently, Managers and Drivers are specified by flags and loaded using utils.load_object(). This method allows for them to be implemented as singletons, classes, modules or objects. As long as the path specified by the flag leads to an object (or a callable that returns an object) that responds to getattr, it should work as a manager or driver.
The nova.service Module
nova.service
The nova.manager Module
nova.manager
Implementation-Specific Drivers
A manager will generally load a driver for some of its tasks. The driver is responsible for specific implementation details. Anything running shell commands on a host, or dealing with other non-python code should probably be happening in a driver.
Drivers should minimize touching the database, although it is currently acceptable for implementation specific data. This may be reconsidered at some point.
It usually makes sense to define an Abstract Base Class for the specific driver (i.e. VolumeDriver), to define the methods that a different driver would need to implement.