Difference between revisions of "Convection"

Revision as of 21:00, 16 April 2013

PROPOSAL ONLY: Workflow-as-a-Service (Convection)

Please note that this is a PROPOSAL ONLY. This is not yet implemented.

What is Convection

Convection is proposal for a new Workflow-as-a-Service project for OpenStack clouds. Convection could be a public facing API service that provides task and state management capabilities, enabling OpenStack API consumers to build complex multi-step applications running on an OpenStack cloud which could be a public cloud, private cloud, or a hybrid cloud. Convection could also be a service that other OpenStack projects could leverage to perform work. e.x. One possible method for Heat to perform orchestration of standing up cloud stacks could be to leverage a Workflow service for task oriented steps of spinning up and connecting cloud resources. Conversely, customers wanting to run meta-workflows could leverage Heat as one task in their meta workflow where orchestration of a stack is one task in a larger meta workflow.

Use Cases for Workflow-as-a-Service

Possible use cases for a Workflow Service could include:

• Long running processes
• Batch Processes (e.g. encoding/decoding)
• Task execution management for spinning up resources via an orchestration system (such as Heat)
• Scheduled workflows via Nova Scheduler
• etc

Why the name Convection?