Proposal: No Cloud Disposable Clients

Tim Flink tflink at redhat.com
Fri Dec 5 00:00:31 UTC 2014


This all got started with an idea that Mike pitched earlier today and
I'm not sure how much this has diverged from what he was originally
thinking and it's still a rough concept but the more I think about
this, the more I like the idea.

One of the big blockers that we have right now is support for
disposable clients. Most of the exploration work that we've done so far
has involved some sort of cloud system (openstack, open nebula etc.)
but I'm wondering if we would be better served by avoiding cloud
systems entirely.

We've (or maybe just me) been assuming that the tasks have be executed
directly on buildslaves like they currently are and any disposable
client would have to be prepared and booted before we start task
execution.

What if we turned that on it's head a bit and put VM spawning into the
task itself -  spawn a vm local to the buildslave that is then
responsible for the actual work in the task instead of doing all the
work inside the buildslave process? This would allow for image and vm
requirements to be described in the task without weird multiple
parsings and could avoid most if not all of the problems/complexity that
we've started seeing in getting buildbot to work with latent
buildslaves.

I've written up a brief article in the phab wiki:

https://phab.qadevel.cloud.fedoraproject.org/w/planning/nocloud_disposable_clients/

Any thoughts on whether this is worth pursuing as an alternative to
openstack et. al? If there's anything that isn't clear, please ask for
clarification.

Tim
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