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Difference between revisions of "Graffiti"

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=== Screencasts ===
 
=== Screencasts ===
  
* [http://youtu.be/f0SZtPgcxk4|15 Minute Concept Overview]
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* [http://youtu.be/f0SZtPgcxk4| 15 Minute Concept Overview]
* [http://youtu.be/m1cTnXwxgks|5 Minute Brief (for those running tight on time)]
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* [http://youtu.be/m1cTnXwxgks| 5 Minute Brief (for those running tight on time)]
  
 
=== Architecture ===
 
=== Architecture ===

Revision as of 17:27, 29 April 2014

What's in my cloud?

I've got a lot of resources in my cloud.

  • How do I find what I need?
  • How do I describe what I have?


Graffiti provides cross service "metadata tagging" and search aggregation for cloud resources.

Introduction and Project Goals

The high level goal of Graffiti is for OpenStack users to be able to declare the capabilities and service level objectives they require and then be guided in selecting the actual cloud resources that match their desired capabilities.

Various OpenStack services provide techniques to abstract low level resource selection to one level higher, such as flavors, volume types, or artifact types. These resource abstractions often allow "metadata" in terms of key-value pair properties to further specialize and describe instances of each resource type. However, collaborating on those properties can be a disconnected and difficult process. This often involves searching outdated wikis and opening the source code. In addition, the metadata properties often need to be correlated across several different services. It becomes more difficult as a cloud's scale grows and the number of resources being managed increases.

At its most basic concept Graffiti is a project to enable better metadata collaboration across services and projects. Graffiti intends to provide a common methodology to describe resource capabilities in the cloud which we believe can then be leveraged by other projects such as Horizon, Nova, Heat, scheduling, reservation, and policy enforcement to enable better cross service collaboration and consistency.

How you use it

  1. Load your metadata definitions (called property types or capability types)
    1. Into the Graffiti central dictionary
    2. Or configure Graffiti plugins to include existing definitions provided by the various services
  2. "Tag" the resources in the cloud with your properties and capabilities
  3. Let users find the resources with your desired properties and capabilities

Terminology Note

Within Graffiti, we use the term "tag" interchangeably with the traditional meaning for the word "tag". In Graffiti, we believe that a user can simply tag a capability onto a resource. Sometimes tagging the capability results in a simple keyword and sometimes it may map to multiple properties that they can specialize. To the end user, it shouldn't matter how the data is handled.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please see our Graffiti/FAQ for answers to common questions.

How it works

Graffiti provides cross service "metadata tagging" and search aggregation for cloud resources. In Graffiti, metadata definitions may be simple property types or may be structured into simple hierarchy of objects that we call capabilities. Each of those capabilities may contain many properties.

Graffiti provides cross service and cross environment:

  • metadata definition aggregation and administration
  • resource "tagging" aggregation
  • resource metadata search aggregation (metadata properties, name, and description)

Screencasts

Architecture

The full architecture may be found on the Architecture page.

Status

We are working on a proof of concept with Horizon that crosses Nova, Glance, and Cinder. We are using the POC to help us better understand technical issues and will use that knowledge to help contribute to existing projects and to build out the Graffiti concepts appropriately.

The Graffiti project currently has the following aspects:


We will be at the summit with a demo of the POC (in whatever state it is) and have a scheduled design session where we'd love to discuss with the community where Graffiti can best fit in to the ecosystem and how it may relate to other projects and use cases.

Get Involved

Graffiti is new project that HP and Intel have started working on and we invite your participation. We encourage participation in helping us find where Graffiti can best fit in to the ecosystem and how it may relate to other projects and use cases.

Graffiti is just getting underway and we have been working on a POC to explore concepts. The POC is being done under open development. We would like to transition from our POC to working on blueprints in existing services as well as Graffiti.

IRC

The developers use IRC in #graffiti on Freenode for development discussion.

Development