This ended up being longer than I thought. Apologies up front. Let me start by saying that I think the teardown scenarios have a lot of value, and are something that we want to make sure that the OSLC Automation spec supports. My biggest concern over the current proposals for supporting these scenarios is the use of Automation Plans / Results as surrogates for the deployed environments. As I view it, an Automation Plan is nothing more than the definition of some action (or set of actions, either explicitly or implicitly defined) that a provider can execute. An Automation Request is the indication that a desired action should be taken (along with any necessary data needed to successfully take that action). And, an Automation Result is the "history" of what happened when that action was taken. This, to me, is very opaque, in a good way. Many many different things could have occurred as part of the action being taken -- a build could have been generated, a software stack/topology could have been instantiated, a car could have been fabricated, a valve opened, etc. I think we should tread carefully before adding data specific to one of these contexts to the core of the specification. The notion of "profiles" came up as well as the idea of people building "domain" specs on top of Automation. Both of those sound like plausible and valuable ideas to me.
Turning specifically to the teardown scenarios. When I think about this, I envision two predominant camps of providers. Those that are effectively generic with no idea what their actions are doing, and those that are purpose built which have an explicit understanding of what they are being asked to do. In the generic case, I don't see any really viable way for this to be handled without conscious intent by the users of the provider in creating appropriate automation teardown plans (possibly dynamically) to complement those that were created to instantiate the environment. So, in the generic case, the coupling of multiple automation plans into a cohesive group is user-defined. For the purpose-built case, my expectation is there is a "resource" that exists that the provider knows it can take a specific set of actions on (possibly with the ability to have that set extended by the user). As a simple example, let's think of a system for managing Virtual Machines. The VM is the resource here, and the system likely knows how to instantiate one, (re)start/stop it, and delete it. Technically, there are probably two resources, the VM image and the live VM instance. You'd take the instantiation action on the image and the (re)start/stop and delete actions on the instance. That distinction will actually come in handy in a moment. Keeping with the VM example. I would expect that the provider would expose the VM image as a resource of some kind (but not as an Automation Plan itself). In that resource there would be a link to the instantiate action (i.e., the Automation Plan that knows how to instantiate an instance of that image). A consumer could submit an Automation Request for that Automation Plan. The Automation Result generated from that, amongst other things, would have a link (probably through a Contribution) to the resultant VM instance (which is, again, some other type of resource, but not an Automation Result itself). That instance would have links to various actions (Automation Plans) that could be taken on it (e.g., the (re)start/stop and delete mentioned above). Note, the "provider" I mentioned at the top of this paragraph is really two (or more) providers. One for the VM resources (and whatever domain/spec they belong to) and one for the Automation spec. In the generic provider scenario, I would envision that further actions that could be taken as a result of the completion of one Automation Plan would show up as contributions on the first. Those contributions may be dynamically generated by the first automation plan itself, or generated by the provider due to (user-defined) metadata associated with the Automation Plan. It seems like it could be useful for us to define this type of contribution explicitly (mostly just an action name/type and a link to the appropriate Automation Plan). I think the whole discussion around registering "interest" (or dependencies) is also very useful. However, I don't see that as Automation specific. I think that is something that better belongs at Core or a separate spec. Perhaps we do some work to scope and spec out something initially and bring it forward? This is similar to how we would handle the idea of Notifications that came up during the v2 spec work around Automation. If you made it this far, kudos! I'll be out of the office for a while (a solid two weeks), but I'll be tracking responses and reply when I get back. Charles Rankin Rational CTO Team -- Mobile Development Strategy 101/4L-002 T/L 966-2386
