This is the initial base of what will hopefully become a powerful API
that machines will use to communicate. It will be the basis of the
stateful data store that can be used for exported resources, fact
exchange, state machine flags, locks, and much more.
This polishes the password resource so that it can actually avoid
writing the password to disk, and so that the work actually happens in
CheckApply where it can properly interact with the graph. This resource
now re-generates the password when it receives a notification.
The send/recv plumbing has been extended so that receivers can detect
when they're receiving new values. This is particularly important if
they might otherwise not expect those values to change and cache them
for efficiency purposes.
Resources can send "refresh" notifications along edges. These messages
are sent whenever the upstream (initiating vertex) changes state. When
the changed state propagates downstream, it will be paired with a
refresh flag which can be queried in the CheckApply method of that
resource.
Future work will include a stateful refresh tracking mechanism so that
if a refresh event is generated and not consumed, it will be saved
across an interrupt (shutdown) or a crash so that it can be re-applied
on the subsequent run. This is important because the unapplied refresh
is a form of hysteresis which needs to be tracked and remembered or we
won't be able to determine that the state is wrong!
Still to do:
* Update the autogrouping code to handle the edge notify properties!
* Actually finish the stateful bool code
This is a new design idea which I had. Whether it stays around or not is
up for debate. For now it's a rough POC.
The idea is that any resource can _produce_ data, and any resource can
_consume_ data. This is what we call send and recv. By linking the two
together, data can be passed directly between resources, which will
maximize code re-use, and allow for some interesting logical graphs.
For example, you might have an HTTP resource which puts its output in a
particular file. This avoids having to overload the HTTP resource with
all of the special behaviours of the File resource.
For our POC, I implemented a `password` resource which generates a
random string which can then be passed to a receiver such as a file. At
this point the password resource isn't recommended for sensitive
applications because it caches the password as plain text.
Still to do:
* Statically check all of the type matching before we run the graph
* Verify that our autogrouping works correctly around this feature
* Verify that appropriate edges exist between send->recv pairs
* Label the password as generated instead of storing the plain text
* Consider moving password logic from Init() to CheckApply()
* Consider combining multiple send values (list?) into a single receiver
* Consider intermediary transformation nodes for value combining
You can try it out yourself by running `go build` and then calling it.
Use a bare integer argument to create that number of noop resources.
There are clearly some performance optimizations that we could do for
extremely large graphs.
This is a monster patch that splits out the yaml and puppet based graph
generation and pushes them behind a common API. In addition alternate
pluggable GAPI's can be easily added! The important side benefit is that
you can now write a custom GAPI for embedding mgmt!
This also includes some slight clean ups that I didn't find it worth
splitting into separate patches.
This is an initial implementation of a possible golang API. In this
particular version, the *gconfig.GraphConfig data structures are
emitted, instead of possibly building a pgraph. As long as we can
represent any local graph as the data structure, then this is fine!
Is there a way to merge the gconfig Vertex and the pgraph Vertex?
