[Oslc-Automation] Execution environment scenario for deploy subdomain

[John Arwe]

Sorry just catching up with this particular stream of thought.
I know "enough to be dangerous" about Reconciliation.  There's nothing 
specifically like a "computing environment" in Recon today (2.0 finalized 
recently), but users are at least talking about concepts that might be 
similar (clusters of various sorts) for follow-ons.  Tuan Dang is the WG 
lead, +ccing him.  I think there is a notional plan to immediately start 
working on a "2.0+1" version, so he'd be collecting scenarios "real soon 
now".
As you folks have been discussing it so far however, there are a number of 
subtly different issues involved.
1: Reconciliation proper ... this would play if there are cases where two 
distinct actors have different identities (URLs) for some entity that is a 
non-information resource (often called "real world" resources) yet to us 
humans (and hence to code that wants to automate our actions) they are in 
some way "the same".  In some places, people talk about tools individually 
managing different "aspects" of the thing.  Reconciliation basically 
worries about how to decide whether or not two resources are (probably) 
"the same" in this sense.  Apologies for the indirect language, but 
precise language here is like trying to grab a handful of fog.  Not all 
even agree that the distinction is useful; others argue it's 
essential....*that* kind of fog.
2: "Compatibility" checking ... in this way of thinking, each consumer has 
a list of minimum requirements (perhaps per task), each provider lists the 
capabilities it exposes, and they're "compatible" (but NOT "the same") if 
the intersection of the two is at least what the consumer needs.  Another 
way to think of these descriptions are as query predicates; the result of 
applying the consumer's query predicate over the set of providers is the 
set of providers actually useful to the consumer.  I've seen that come up 
in other domains already.
3: What do "the same" and "compatible" really mean when the resources 
being used have triples whose objects are other resources?  This is just 
another form of the well-known copy problem (shallow or deep?), which of 
course has no really appealing solutions.  If one requirement you have as 
a consumer is a 2-tier deployment topology, this answer obviously matters 
quite a bit.
4: Re-use of Reconciliation (the domain spec or concept from #1) vs it's 
*Vocabulary* terms, which of course are freely open to re-use in other 
specs.  If you were to model an execution env as a service, as an example, 
"there's a vocabulary term for that" aka crtv:ServiceInstance (personal 
guess).  You could do that orthogonally to your answer to any other 
question/point here.

Best Regards, John

Voice US 845-435-9470  BluePages
Tivoli OSLC Lead - Show me the Scenario


"Oslc-Automation" <oslc-automation-bounces at open-services.net> wrote on 
05/03/2013 04:16:08 AM:

> 
> I believe that the Reconciliation WG have been working on a way to 
> match two descriptions of IT resources. From my brief look at their 
> work I didn't see anything related to this sort of execution 
> environment (at least, not for the test subdomain scenarios, it 
> might work for the deployment one). Perhaps we could propose a new 
> vocabulary for them for common themes in our subdomains? Does anyone
> know enough about their work to know if that would be a good fit? 
> 
> martin
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