Features/Wallaby

= Wallaby =

Summary
Wallaby is a programmable semantic configuration service for the Condor workload management system for compute-intensive jobs.

Owner

 * Name: William Benton


 * Email: willb@redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 17
 * Last updated: 10 February 2012
 * Percentage of completion: 100%

The most recent packages in f17-candidate have been updated to work with Ruby 1.9.3 and to include all functionality from upstream releases since the last build.

Detailed Description
Wallaby enables administrators of Condor pools to develop new configurations at a high level, by applying named user-visible features to groups of nodes (instead of editing low-level parameter settings in individual configuration files). It also validates configurations according to a semantic model, pushes notifications to affected nodes upon a configuration change, and deploys updated, valid configurations to nodes along with a list of Condor components impacted by the change. Wallaby includes snapshot capabilities and version control and is programmable via a remote-access, object-oriented API with bindings for Python and Ruby; various Wallaby users have developed cool tools based on this API.

Benefit to Fedora
Including Wallaby will dramatically simplify configuration management for Condor pools running on Fedora systems.

Scope
The wallaby package, its associated tools, and their dependencies (listed below) should be included in Fedora. In the case of Wallaby and its dependencies, these packages are currently in Fedora updates. Some of the associated configuration tools based on the Wallaby API are currently in Fedora testing. Wallaby is essentially isolated, as no other packages depend on it at this time, although the cumin web console for Condor pools (currently in Fedora updates) can use data from Wallaby if it is available.

How To Test
The Wallaby source repository includes a regression test suite that can be run via. For a higher-level test, you'll need a Qpid broker and at least one Condor node. After doing that, running through the steps in the Wallaby user tutorial is a good place to start. Testers with some Ruby experience may be interested in interacting with the Wallaby console.

User Experience
End-users should not be impacted by the addition of Wallaby; its intended audience is Condor pool administrators.

Dependencies
The Wallaby service and its associated tools (i.e., packages generated from the  SRPM) depend upon the following packages:


 * ruby 1.8 (already in Fedora)
 * ruby-rhubarb (already in updates for F15-F17)
 * ruby-spqr (already in updates for F15-F17)
 * ruby-qmf (already in Fedora)
 * ruby-sqlite3 (already in Fedora)
 * rubygem-sinatra (already in Fedora)

The Condor-specific guided configuration tools and the Condor configuration daemon (i.e., packages generated from the  SRPM) depend upon the following packages:


 * condor (already in Fedora)
 * python (already in Fedora)
 * python-qmf (already in Fedora)
 * python-condorutils (already in Fedora)

The default Wallaby database,, has no external dependencies.

The following packages can use Wallaby:


 * cumin (in updates for F15-F17; can use the python-wallaby package)

Contingency Plan
None necessary.

Documentation

 * The upstream documentation is at getwallaby.com

Release Notes

 * This release includes Wallaby, a scalable semantic configuration service for Condor pools.

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/Wallaby