This forces us to spread all clusterable nodes across 2 deploys and

certain jobs, like CC, use the job_name+index to uniquely identify a node

I believe they're planning on switching to guids for bosh job identifiers.
I saw in another thread you and Dmitriy discussed this. Any other reasons
for having unique job names we should know about?

How would you feel about the interface allowing for specifying

additional releases, jobs, and templates to be colocated on existing jobs,
along with property configuration for these things?

I don't quite follow what you are proposing here. Can you clarify?

What I mean is the tools we build for generating manifests will support
specifying inputs (probably in the form of a YAML file) that declares what
additional releases you want to add to the deployment, what additional jobs
you may want to add, what additional job templates you may want to colocate
with an existing job, and property configuration for those additional jobs
or colocated job templates. A common example is wanting to colocate some
monitoring agent on all the jobs, and providing some credential
configuration so it can pump metrics into some third party service. This
would be for things not already covered by the LAMB architecture.

Something like that would work for me as long as we were still able to

take advantage of the scripts/tooling in cf-deployment to manage the config
and templates we manage in lds-deployment.

Yes, that'd be the plan.

Cheers,
Amit


On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Mike Youngstrom <youngm(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the response. See comments below:

Sensitive property management as part of manifest generation

(encrypted or acquired from an outside source)

How do you currently get these encrypted or external values into your
manifests? At manifest generation time, would you be able to generate a
stub on the fly from this source, and pass it into the manifest generation
script?

Yes, that would work fine. Just thought I'd call it out as something our
current solution does that we'd have to augment in cf-deployment.

If for some reason we are forced to fork a stock release we'd like to

be able to use that forked release we are building instead of the publicly
available one for manifest generation and release uploads, etc.

Yes, using the stock release will be the default option, but we will
support several other ways of specifying a release, including providing a
URL to a remote tarball, a path to a local release directory, a path to a
local tarball, and maybe a git URL and SHA.

Great!

The job names in each deployment must be unique across the

installation.

Why do the job names need to be unique across deployments?

This is because a single bosh cannot connect to multiple datacenters which
for us represent different availability zones. This forces us to spread
all clusterable nodes across 2 deploys and certain jobs, like CC, use the
job_name+index to uniquely identify a node [0]. Therefore if we have 2 CCs
deployed across 2 AZ we must have one job named cloud_controller_az1 and
the other named cloud_controller_az2. Does that make sense? I recognize
this is mostly the fault of a limitation in Bosh but until bosh supports
connection to multiple vsphere datacenters with a single director we will
need to account for it in our templatin.

[0]
https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cloud_controller_ng/blob/5257a8af6990e71cd1e34ae8978dfe4773b32826/bosh-templates/cloud_controller_worker_ctl.erb#L48

Occasionally we may wish to use some config from a stock release not
currently exposed in a cf-deployment template. I'd like to be sure there
is a way we can add that config, in a not hacky way, without waiting for a
PR to be accepted and subsequent release.

This would be ideal. Currently, a lot of complexity in manifest
generation is around, if you specify a certain value X, then you need to
make sure you specify values Y, Z, etc. in a compatible way. E.g. if you
have 3 etcd instances, then the value for the etcd.machines property needs
to have those 3 IPs. If you specify domain as "mydomain.com", then you
need to specify in other places that the UAA URL is "
https://uaa.mydomain.com". The hope is most of this complexity goes
away with BOSH Links (
https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-notes/blob/master/links.md). My
hope is that, as the complexity goes away, we will have to maintain less
logic and will be able to comfortably expose more, if not all, of the
properties.

Great

We have our own internal bosh releases and config that we'll need to
merge in with the things cf-deployment is doing.

How would you feel about the interface allowing for specifying additional
releases, jobs, and templates to be colocated on existing jobs, along with
property configuration for these things?

I don't quite follow what you are proposing here. Can you clarify?

we'd like to augment this with our own release jobs and config that we

know to work with cf-deployment 250's and perhaps tag it as v250.lds

Would a workflow like this work for you: maintain an lds-deployment repo,
which includes cf-deployment as a submodule, and you can version
lds-deployment and update your submodule pointer to cf-deployment as you
see fit? lds-deployment will probably just need the cf-deployment
submodule, and a config file describing the "blessed" versions of the
non-stock releases you wish to add on. I know this is lacking details, but
does something along those lines sound like a reasonable workflow?

Something like that would work for me as long as we were still able to
take advantage of the scripts/tooling in cf-deployment to manage the config
and templates we manage in lds-deployment.

Thanks,
Mike

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Mike Youngstrom <youngm(a)gmail.com>
wrote:

Another situation we have that you may want to keep in mind while
developing cf-deployment:

* We are using vsphere and currently we have a cf installation with 2 AZ
using 2 separate vsphere "Datacenters" (more details:
https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-notes/issues/7). This means we
have a CF installation that is actually made up of 2 deployments. So, we
need to generate a manifest for az1 and another for az2. The job names in
each deployment must be unique across the installation (e.g.
cloud_controller_az1 and cloud_controller_az2) would be the cc job names in
each deployment.

Mike

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 3:38 PM, Mike Youngstrom <youngm(a)gmail.com>
wrote:

Here are some of the examples:

* Sensitive property management as part of manifest generation
(encrypted or acquired from an outside source)

* We have our own internal bosh releases and config that we'll need to
merge in with the things cf-deployment is doing. For example, if
cf-deployment tags v250 as including Diego 3333 and etcd 34 with given
templates perhaps we'd like to augment this with our own release jobs and
config that we know to work with cf-deployment 250's and perhaps tag it as
v250.lds and that becomes what we use to generate our manifests and upload
releases.

* Occasionally we may wish to use some config from a stock release not
currently exposed in a cf-deployment template. I'd like to be sure there
is a way we can add that config, in a not hacky way, without waiting for a
PR to be accepted and subsequent release.

* If for some reason we are forced to fork a stock release we'd like to
be able to use that forked release we are building instead of the publicly
available one for manifest generation and release uploads, etc.

Does that help?

Mike



On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 9:50 PM, Amit Gupta <agupta(a)pivotal.io> wrote:

Thanks for the feedback Mike!

Can you tell us more specifically what sort of extensions you need?
It would be great if cf-deployment provided an interface that could serve
the needs of essentially all operators of CF.

Thanks,
Amit

On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Mike Youngstrom <youngm(a)gmail.com>
wrote:

This is great stuff! My organization currently maintains our own
custom ways to generate manifests, include secure properties, and manage
release versions.

We would love to base the next generation of our solution on
cf-deployment. Have you put any thought into how others might customize or
extend cf-deployment? Our needs are very similar to yours just sometimes a
little different.

Perhaps a private fork periodically merged with a known good release
combination (tag) might be appropriate? Or some way to include the same
tools into a wholly private repo?

Mike


On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Amit Gupta <agupta(a)pivotal.io> wrote:

Hi all,

The CF OSS Release Integration team (casually referred to as the
"MEGA team") is trying to solve a lot of tightly interrelated problems, and
make many of said problems less interrelated. It is difficult to address
just one issue without touching the others, so the following proposal
addresses several issues, but the most important ones are:

* decompose cf-release into many independently manageable,
independently testable, independently usable releases
* separate manifest generation strategies from the release source,
paving the way for Diego to be part of the standard deployment

This proposal will outline a picture of how manifest generation will
work in a unified manner in development, test, and integration
environments. It will also outline a picture of what each release’s test
pipelines will look like, how they will feed into a common integration
environment, and how feedback from the integration environment will feed
back into the test environments. Finally, it will propose a picture for
what the integration environment will look like, and how we get from the
current integration environment to where we want to be.

For further details, please feel free to view and comment here:


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Viga_TzUB2nLxN_ILqksmUiILM1hGhq7MBXxgLaUOkY

Thanks,
Amit, CF OSS Release Integration team