2016-12-21 RackHD Architecture Forum Meeting notes

Date

Attendees

Proposed Agenda & Goals

  • Attendance
  • Review action items from last meeting
  • Review/discuss DevCon whiteboard notes to ensure alignment
    • Former user (Deleted): What does scale mean?
    • Former user (Deleted): We need requirements from the business to understand our scaling requirements
    • Former user (Deleted): What are the requirements for scaling the WFE?
    • Former user (Deleted): We have to have some constraints on what scale means
    • Former user (Deleted): VCIO - establish a set of guiding principle
      • i.e. expect all services of RackHD run on same machine or not
      • i.e. we need to scale beyond 1 rack, or 1 row
    • Former user (Deleted): neighborhoods that span racks, rows, DCs and geographic sites
    • Former user (Deleted): Re-confirm the notion of a single instance of "RackHD Core" service are responsible for a "neighborhood", no matter how large or small
    • Former user (Deleted): Must make some statements about how large a neighborhood can be
    • Former user (Deleted): What are the requirements for a single RackHD core instance
    • Former user (Deleted): We have to express requirements in terms of SLA? (what metrics do we express our scale requirements in?)
      • No. of nodes, - not enough to express in this term
      • No. of workflows / sec
      • What about discovery?
      • What about OS install?
      • What about firmware updates? 
    • Former user (Deleted): Need to be able to say that we have architect-ed this to address the different aspects of scale
    • Former user (Deleted): How do we know when we have broken down the services to a "granular enough" level – what is practical? How do we know what is practical? 
    • Former user (Deleted): Need to be cognizant of unintended consequences that come from granularity
    • Former user (Deleted): Pick something to focus on first, like discovery
    • Former user (Deleted): Told team to review remaining whiteboards and send email to DL with questions and comments
  • Craft mission and/or vision statement(s) based on discussion
  • Discuss 1st deliverable - updated architecture diagram – architecture as it is today
    • What services in ecosystem should be included as being part of the architecture? 
      • Should we include all services, no matter how mature? 
      • Former user (Deleted): AI: Create strawman set of diagrams that include all RackHD Core, some external, some InfraEnablers and Enhanced PE
    • Deployment diagrams vs. architecture diagrams
      • Solution architecture vs. design architecture
    • What should an architecture diagram include?
    • How much detail is appropriate?
    • Should we have a "drill down" approach to architecture diagrams?
    • Former user (Deleted): We need to have a single source of truth for what this team feels is "our architecture" that others can look to for builiding their own collateral for their own audiences
    • Tim Larson: AI: Joe and Tim to pull together existing collateral into a single place
  • Review AIs from 12/19/16 OSE Commit Review Board meeting
    • Former user (Deleted): Did not get to this set of topics, will need to be added to the backlog of topics 
    • Deeper discussion(s) on the following topics
      • Image repository service
      • Service discovery and the use (or not) of Consul
      • Service isolation & decomposition
        • How granular is practical?
        • What is driving the granularity?

Action items

  • Former user (Deleted) - Strawman mission/vision statement(s) - posted in Works In Progress 
  • Former user (Deleted)Tim Larson  - Pull together existing architectural collateral into a single place - Worked with Tim L to gather various decks from his working space along with published decks from Syncplicity
  • Former user (Deleted) - Strawman (starting set) architectural diagrams of where we are today (drill downs) - have not generated a strawman, but have collected what I believe to be the set of collateral that represents our latest diagrams – these will be used for discussion and how to move forward creating our new single source of truth updated to today. 
  • Former user (Deleted)Tim Larson - Decide on minute taker for forum, Tim suggests Tom Sullivan
  • Former user (Deleted) - Add minute taker to team and invites
  • Former user (Deleted)Former user (Deleted) - Discuss idea of "guiding principles" and decide how to generate - have done nothing with this yet
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