I think I hear 3 major areas not adequately covered by our usual “code review”: 1. Documentation 2. Deployment Builds 3. Management of config parameters
The other areas mentioned by Otto (testing, perf test, Stellar impact, and REST api impact), are entirely valid, but fall under existing code and architecture that seems generally adequate. Regarding #1, Documentation, I’d like to branch a discussion thread for a proposal I’m about to make, to enhance our use of README files as usable and up-to-date end-user documentation, linked from the Metron site. Implicit in that is the idea that we’d deprecate using the cwiki for anything but long-lived demonstrations/tutorials that are unlikely to go obsolete. For #2, Deployment Builds: This is difficult, and unfortunately I’m not an expert with these things, but we need to automate this as much as possible. Config params will always interact heavily with deployment issues, but let’s leave that for #3 :0) As far as RPMs, Ansible playbooks, or Docker images go, we’d like to automate so that developers never have to do anything when they are committing modifications of existing components, and even when new components are added (like the Profiler is being added now), it should insofar as possible be automated via maven declarations. But that takes input from the experts in each of the areas. Also, what would people think of dropping Ansible in favor of Ambari and Docker as the preferred deployment management approaches? #3, Management of config parameters: I’ve been thinking about this lately, but haven’t written up a proposal yet. I’m bothered by the wide ranging variability in the way Metron configs are managed: files, zookeeper, environment variables, traditional Hadoop-style configs, and roll-your-own json configs, sometimes shared, sometimes duplicated, not to mention Ambari over it all. This has been encouraged by the huge number of Stack components that Metron depends on, and the relative independence of the components Metron itself is composed of. But I think as Otto points out, as we grow the number of components and mature out of the incubator, we have to get this under control. We need an architecture for management of configuration parameters of the Metron topologies. (We can’t do much about the Stack components, but Ambari is establishing a culture around managing those.) The architecture needs to include update methodology for semantic changes in parameter sets. I’m mulling such an architecture, but what do other people think? Is this a valid need? Thanks, --Matt On 1/12/17, 8:23 AM, "Michael Miklavcic" <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Otto, You make a great point. AFA RPM/MPack, we do have some work in the pipeline for streamlining things a bit with the RPM's and MPack code such that they will be used for performing the Metron install in the sandbox VM's rather than Ansible. (I'd search for the public Jiras and post them here, but Jira is down for maintenance currently.) This should help make it obvious that a change or new feature requires modifications because they will be in the critical path to testing. Documentation is still tricky because we have README files, javadoc, and the wiki. But in general I think the current approach is to put concrete functionality docs in the READMEs as much as possible because they can be tracked and versioned with Git. I think the community has actually been doing a pretty good job here. The wiki is a little more tricky because there is typically only one version, which tracks master, not necessarily the latest stable release. Mike On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 8:42 AM, Otto Fowler <[email protected]> wrote: > As Metron evolves to include new deployment options, features, and > configurations it is hard and only getting harder for contributors, > committers, and reviewers to understand what the required changes are > across the different areas of the system to correctly and completely > introduce a change or new feature in the system. > > We have talked some about the requirements or expectations for submitters > with regards to tests and coverage, coding style, and documentation but I > don’t think we have enough guidance on deployment or other changes that > need to be considered. For committers it is pretty much the same, with the > extra stuff around that process. > > Right now it seems as a committer I’m counting on others like Nick or Casey > to understand anything that may be missing from a submission when I review > it. Should there by an Ambari/RPM change? Does this change the RestAPI? > Does this effect STELLAR Lang/SHELL? Does it need customer Docker Compose > work? etc etc. > > I think as we grow the community and try to get out of incubation it will > be impractical for us to count on this, and we are even now increasing the > risk of regression or functional gaps ( unrealized ) that will have an > adverse effect on having a stable master. > > I think we should discuss if and how we can improve this or the issue of my > sanity ;). > > What are the criteria that we need to have submitters and reviewers have in > mind? > * Test > * Doc > ** Obsoleting of existing documentation/how-to’s ( even hortonworks posts ) > * Performance > ** How do we test for performance? > *** Standards > *** Tools and processes > * Deployment > ** RPM > ** Docker > ** Ansible > ** Ambari > ** AWS Script > * Functional > ** STELLAR/Shell > ** REST api’s > * Dev/review guide > ** Does the review / submit guide need to account for it? > > Any thoughts? >
