Release Infrastructure/BOSS

Revision as of 12:41, 18 June 2010

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BOSS "Build Orchestration Supervision System"

BOSS is a workflow orchestrator, a system that is configured to your workflow requirements and interacts with OBS as well as with external systems to apply the required actions by your workflow. BOSS is a system 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 programs
• allows for parallel implementation of the system
• plugins are usable independently
• take away the productization process/logic from the build infrastructure

What is BOSS

• a message bus to collect all triggers and feedback from the different components of the ecosystem
• A queue-manager to handle delivery of incoming messages from all existing systems to the worklow framework
• a work flow framework allowing site-specific workflow definition

Architectecture

OBS event publisher

Message Bus

• a collection of proxies
  • each proxy interprets on external system
• a messaging system (such as RabbitMQ or other similar) and a signal dispatcher

Queue Manager

Work Flow System

• a set of definitions(classes) {objects, conditions, transitions, states} to define the components of the productization process
• separate workflow scripts for the product (can be multiple)
• a collection of plugins
  • one plugin per external system
  • possible plugins to handle transitions (parsing the requests)

Resources

BOSS uses Ruote as the workflow system; there is an overview of Ruote

The code will be in a git project