ironic/doc/source/dev/architecture.rst
Ruby Loo 22a6569dad 'As of' in documentation is incorrect
The documentation has 'As of the Newton release...'. 'As of' is
used to indicate the time or date from which something starts.
In this context, that is incorrect; we want to indicate that
the Newton release is the last/end release.

Change-Id: I080694d2f4e2b6d3b53e1b2f15b96f59b3eb16cf
2016-08-09 22:55:46 -04:00

125 lines
4.8 KiB
ReStructuredText

.. _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.
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 task is created by decorating a method on
an interface with periodic_ decorator, e.g.
::
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.
.. note::
In releases prior to and including the Newton release, it's possible to
bind periodic tasks to a driver object instead of an interface. This is
deprecated and support for it will be removed in the Ocata release.
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/v1.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: ../api/ironic.common.hash_ring.html
.. _periodic: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/futurist/api.html#futurist.periodics.periodic