Latest revision as of 11:19, 3 August 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 and the MeeGo Community Edition use BOSS to automate processes and to orchestrate a CI (Continuous Integration) ecosystem around OBS.

See also:

• Installation
• Roadmap

Overview

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 workflows 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

• 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

Resources

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