Release Infrastructure/BOSS

Revision as of 13:25, 21 March 2011

BOSS "Build Orchestration Supervision System"

BOSS is a workflow orchestrator, a system that can be configured to automate your workflow requirements; it interacts with the OBS and with people and systems around it to apply your workflow steps.

MeeGo will use BOSS to orchestrate a CI (Continuous Integration) ecosystem around OBS.

Why

• we need a robust, flexible way of configuring a set of triggers (ex. OBS event or a submit request) and responses
• OBS is a build system, not a general workflow system
• there is need for automation of responses to OBS actions results
• OBS requests are good but not flexible nor extensible
• there's fear of OBS becoming a big black box doing all the magic (maintainability)
• Hermes is there, but it is just taking care of notifications

Requirements

• parallel worflows for parallel software programmes
• allows for parallel implementation of the system
• plugins are usable independently
• take away the productization process/logic from the build infrastructure

BOSS Implementation and Design

There is a page describing the details of the design and the BOSS code is available.

• a workflow framework allowing site-specific workflow definition
• a message bus and queue-manager to handle delivery of incoming messages from all existing systems to the worklow framework
• a queue-based job distribution system that handles delivery to pools of workers

OBS event publisher

One important part of BOSS integration will be the connectivity with the OBS.

For more details see the OBS Event List

Resources

• AMQP: AMQP.org has the very readable 0.9.1 specification (pdf)
• Ruote: An overview of Ruote
• Performance tests