Enhance Watcher Applier Engine

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/watcher/+spec/enhance-watcher-applier-engine

Taskflow is the default workflow engine for Watcher Applier. In Watcher the flow pattern for linked actions is Graph flow. For parent action A and child action B, this means B depends on A and that the execution of B must wait until A finished. Taskflow has a callback function to decide at runtime whether B should be allowed to execute. The callback function returns a boolean True to allow B execution or False to not. Currently the callback function always returns True in Watcher Applier.

Problem description

For example, we want to live migrate a VM, if there are two potential target nodes that meet the requirements. However, we don’t know which one will definitely be able to migrate successfully. The existing strategy will select one to create a Migrate action and the action may fail if there are no enough resource in the destination node. A solution is that we can make two linked actions for the two potential targets. If first action succeeded, then the second action will be ignored. Otherwise continue to execute the second one. For this purpose, We need the callback function returns True or False depending on the result of previous action A execution. Action B should be executed unless action A failed. If action A executes success, the execution of action B should be ignored.

Use Cases

As a Watcher user, I want to decide an action whether to be executed depending on the result of a previous action.

Proposed change

Now the callback function, named decider, always returns True. We propose to add a new config option ‘action_execution_rule’ which is a dict type. Its key field is strategy name and the value is ‘ALWAYS’ or ‘ANY’. ‘ALWAYS’ means the callback function returns True as usual. ‘ANY’ means the return depends on the result of previous action execution. The callback returns True if previous action gets failed, and the engine continues to run the next action. If previous action executes success, the callback returns False then the next action will be ignored. For strategies that aren’t in ‘action_execution_rule’, the callback always returns True.

If exception is throwing out during the action execution, reverting will be triggered by taskflow. To continue executing the next action, we return False instead of throwing an exception.

Alternatives

None

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

The default value of ‘action_execution_rule’ doesn’t change the behavior of Applier.

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

licanwei

Work Items

• Add a new config option ‘action_execution_rule’

• Implement the callback function

Dependencies

None

Testing

Unittest for all changes

Documentation Impact

None

References

None

History

None