Documentation
¶
Overview ¶
The dependency package exists to address a general problem with shared resources and the management of their lifetimes. Many kinds of software handle these issues with more or less felicity, but it's particularly important that juju (which is a distributed system that needs to be very fault-tolerant) handle them clearly and sanely.
Background ¶
A cursory examination of the various workers run in juju agents (as of 2015-04-20) reveals a distressing range of approaches to the shared resource problem. A sampling of techniques (and their various problems) follows:
- enforce sharing in code structure, either directly via scoping or implicitly via nested runners (state/api conns; agent config)
- code structure is inflexible, and it enforces strictly nested resource lifetimes, which are not always adequate.
- just create N of them and hope it works out OK (environs)
- creating N prevents us from, e.g., using a single connection to an environ and sanely rate-limiting ourselves.
- use filesystem locking across processes (machine execution lock)
- implementation sometimes flakes out, or is used improperly; and multiple agents *are* a problem anyway, but even if we're all in-process we'll need some shared machine lock...
- wrap workers to start up only when some condition is met (post-upgrade stability -- itself also a shared resource)
- lifetime-nesting comments apply here again; *and* it makes it harder to follow the code.
- implement a singleton (lease manager)
- singletons make it *even harder* to figure out what's going on -- they're basically just fancy globals, and have all the associated problems with, e.g. deadlocking due to unexpected shutdown order.
...but, of course, they all have their various advantages:
Of the approaches, the first is the most reliable by far. Despite the inflexibility, there's a clear and comprehensible model in play that has yet to cause serious confusion: each worker is created with its resource(s) directly available in code scope, and trusts that it will be restarted by an independent watchdog if one of its dependencies fails. This characteristic is extremely beneficial and must be preserved; we just need it to be more generally applicable.
The create-N-Environs approach is valuable because it can be simply (if inelegantly) integrated with its dependent worker, and a changed Environ does not cause the whole dependent to fall over (unless the change is itself bad). The former characteristic is a subtle trap (we shouldn't be baking dependency-management complexity into the cores of our workers' select loops, even if it is "simple" to do so), but the latter is important: in particular, firewaller and provisioner are distressingly heavyweight workers and it would be unwise to take an approach that led to them being restarted when not necessary.
The filesystem locking just should not happen -- and we need to integrate the unit and machine agents to eliminate it (and for other reasons too) so we should give some thought to the fact that we'll be shuffling these dependencies around pretty hard in the future. If the approach can make that task easier, then great.
The singleton is dangerous specifically because its dependency interactions are unclear. Absolute clarity of dependencies, as provided by the nesting approaches, is in fact critical; but the sheer convenience of the singleton is alluring, and reminds us that the approach we take must remain easy to use.
The various nesting approaches give easy access to directly-available resources, which is great, but will fail as soon as you have a sufficiently sophisticated dependent that can operate usefully without all its dependencies being satisfied (we have a couple of requirements for this in the unit agent right now). Still, direct resource access *is* tremendously convenient, and we need some way to access one service from another.
However, all of these resources are very different: for a solution that encompasses them all, you kinda have to represent them as interface{} at some point, and that's very risky re: clarity.
Problem ¶
The package is intended to implement the following developer stories:
- As a developer trying to understand the codebase, I want to know what workers are running in an agent at any given time.
- As a developer, I want to be prevented from introducing dependency cycles into my application.
- As a developer, I want to provide a service provided by some worker to one or more client workers.
- As a developer, I want to write a service that consumes one or more other workers' services.
- As a developer, I want to choose how I respond to missing dependencies.
- As a developer, I want to be able to inject test doubles for my dependencies.
- As a developer, I want control over how my service is exposed to others.
- As a developer, I don't want to have to typecast my dependencies from interface{} myself.
- As a developer, I want my service to be restarted if its dependencies change.
That last one might bear a little bit of explanation: but I contend that it's the only reliable approach to writing resilient services that compose sanely into a comprehensible system. Consider:
- Juju agents' lifetimes must be assumed to exceed the MTBR of the systems they're deployed on; you might naively think that hard reboots are "rare"... but they're not. They really are just a feature of the terrain we have to traverse. Therefore every worker *always* has to be capable of picking itself back up from scratch and continuing sanely. That is, we're not imposing a new expectation: we're just working within the existing constraints.
- While some workers are simple, some are decidedly not; when a worker has any more complexity than "none" it is a Bad Idea to mix dependency-management concerns into their core logic: it creates the sort of morass in which subtle bugs thrive.
So, we take advantage of the expected bounce-resilience, and excise all dependency management concerns from the existing ones... in favour of a system that bounces workers slightly more often than before, and thus exercises those code paths more; so, when there are bugs, we're more likely to shake them out in automated testing before they hit users.
We'd maybe also like to implement this story:
- As a developer, I want to add and remove groups of workers atomically, e.g. when starting the set of controller workers for a hosted environ; or when starting the set of workers used by a single unit. [NOT DONE]
...but there's no urgent use case yet, and it's not certain to be superior to an engine-nesting approach.
Solution ¶
Run a single dependency.Engine at the top level of each agent; express every shared resource, and every worker that uses one, as a dependency.Manifold; and install them all into the top-level engine.
When installed under some name, a dependency.Manifold represents the features of a node in the engine's dependency graph. It lists:
- The names of its dependencies (Inputs).
- How to create the worker representing the resource (Start).
- How (if at all) to expose the resource as a service to other resources that know it by name (Output).
...and allows the developers of each independent service a common mechanism for declaring and accessing their dependencies, and the ability to assume that they will be restarted whenever there is a material change to their accessible dependencies.
When the weight of manifolds in a single engine becomes inconvenient, group them and run them inside nested dependency.Engines; the Report() method on the top- level engine will collect information from (directly-) contained engines, so at least there's still some observability; but there may also be call to pass actual dependencies down from one engine to another, and that'll demand careful thought.
Usage ¶
In each worker package, write a `manifold.go` containing the following:
// ManifoldConfig holds the information necessary to configure the worker
// controlled by a Manifold.
type ManifoldConfig struct {
// The names of the various dependencies, e.g.
APICallerName string
// Any other required top-level configuration, e.g.
Period time.Duration
}
// Manifold returns a manifold that controls the operation of a worker
// responsible for <things>, configured as supplied.
func Manifold(config ManifoldConfig) dependency.Manifold {
// Your code here...
return dependency.Manifold{
// * certainly include each of your configured dependency names,
// getResource will only expose them if you declare them here.
Inputs: []string{config.APICallerName, config.MachineLockName},
// * certainly include a start func, it will panic if you don't.
Start: func(getResource dependency.GetResourceFunc) (worker.Worker, error) {
// You presumably want to get your dependencies, and you almost
// certainly want to be closed over `config`...
var apicaller base.APICaller
if err := getResource(config.APICallerName, &apicaller); err != nil {
return nil, err
}
return newSomethingWorker(apicaller, config.Period)
},
// * output func is not obligatory, and should be skipped if you
// don't know what you'll be exposing or to whom.
// * see `worker/gate`, `worker/util`, and
// `worker/dependency/testing` for examples of output funcs.
// * if you do supply an output func, be sure to document it on the
// Manifold func; for example:
//
// // Manifold exposes Foo and Bar resources, which can be
// // accessed by passing a *Foo or a *Bar in the output
// // parameter of its dependencies' getResouce calls.
Output: nil,
}
}
...and take care to construct your manifolds *only* via that function; *all* your dependencies *must* be declared in your ManifoldConfig, and *must* be accessed via those names. Don't hardcode anything, please.
If you find yourself using the same manifold configuration in several places, consider adding helpers to cmd/jujud/agent/engine, which includes mechanisms for simple definition of manifolds that depend on an API caller; on an agent; or on both.
Testing ¶
The `worker/dependency/testing` package, commonly imported as "dt", exposes a `StubResource` that is helpful for testing `Start` funcs in decent isolation, with mocked dependencies. Tests for `Inputs` and `Output` are generally pretty specific to their precise context and don't seem to benefit much from generalisation.
Special considerations ¶
The nodes in your *dependency* graph must be acyclic; this does not imply that the *information flow* must be acyclic. Indeed, it is common for separate components to need to synchronise their actions; but the implementation of Engine makes it inconvenient for either one to depend on the other (and impossible for both to do so).
When a set of manifolds need to encode a set of services whose information flow is not acyclic, apparent A->B->A cycles can be broken by introducing a new shared dependency C to mediate the information flow. That is, A and B can then separately depend upon C; and C itself can start a degenerate worker that never errors of its own accord.
For examples of this technique, search for `cmd/jujud/agent/engine.NewValueWorker` (which is generally used inside other manifolds to pass snippets of agent config down to workers that don't have a good reason to see, or write, the full agent config); and `worker/gate.Manifold`, which is for one-way coordination between workers which should not be started until some other worker has completed some task.
Please be careful when coordinating workers like this; the gate manifold in particular is effectively just another lock, and it'd be trivial to construct a set of gate-users that can deadlock one another. All the usual considerations when working with locks still apply.
Concerns and mitigations thereof ¶
The dependency package will *not* provide the following features:
- Deterministic worker startup. As above, this is a blessing in disguise: if your workers have a problem with this, they're using magical undeclared dependencies and we get to see the inevitable bugs sooner.
- Hand-holding for developers writing Output funcs; the onus is on you to document what you expose; produce useful error messages when they supplied with unexpected types via the interface{} param; and NOT to panic. The onus on your clients is only to read your docs and handle the errors you might emit.
Index ¶
- Constants
- Variables
- func Install(installer Installer, manifolds Manifolds) error
- func Validate(manifolds Manifolds) error
- type Context
- type Engine
- type EngineConfig
- type FilterFunc
- type Installer
- type IsFatalFunc
- type Manifold
- type Manifolds
- type OutputFunc
- type Reporter
- type StartFunc
- type WorstErrorFunc
Constants ¶
const ( // KeyState applies to a worker; possible values are "starting", "started", // "stopping", or "stopped". Or it might be something else, in distant // Reporter implementations; don't make assumptions. KeyState = "state" // KeyError holds some relevant error. In the case of an Engine, this will be: // * any internal error indicating incorrect operation; or // * the most important fatal error encountered by any worker; or // * nil, if none of the above apply; // ...and the value should not be presumed to be stable until the engine // state is "stopped". // // In the case of a manifold, it will always hold the most recent error // returned by the associated worker (or its start func); and will be // rewritten whenever a worker state is set to "started" or "stopped". // // In the case of a resource access, it holds any error encountered when // trying to find or convert the resource. KeyError = "error" // KeyManifolds holds a map of manifold name to further data (including // dependency inputs; current worker state; and any relevant report/error // for the associated current/recent worker.) KeyManifolds = "manifolds" // KeyReport holds an arbitrary map of information returned by a manifold // Worker that is also a Reporter. KeyReport = "report" // KeyInputs holds the names of the manifolds on which this one depends. KeyInputs = "inputs" // KeyResourceLog holds a slice representing the calls the current worker // made to its getResource func; the type of the output param; and any // error encountered. KeyResourceLog = "resource-log" // KeyName holds the name of some resource. KeyName = "name" // KeyType holds a string representation of the type by which a resource // was accessed. KeyType = "type" )
The Key constants describe the constant features of an Engine's Report.
Variables ¶
var ErrBounce = errors.New("restart immediately")
ErrBounce can be returned by a StartFunc or a worker to indicate to the engine that it should be restarted immediately, instead of waiting for ErrorDelay. This is useful for workers which restart themselves to alert dependents that an output has changed.
var ErrMissing = errors.New("dependency not available")
ErrMissing can be returned by a StartFunc or a worker to indicate to the engine that it can't be usefully restarted until at least one of its dependencies changes. There's no way to specify *which* dependency you need, because that's a lot of implementation hassle for little practical gain.
var ErrUninstall = errors.New("resource permanently unavailable")
ErrUninstall can be returned by a StartFunc or a worker to indicate to the engine that it can/should never run again, and that the originating manifold should be completely removed.
Functions ¶
Types ¶
type Context ¶
type Context interface {
// Abort will be closed if the containing engine no longer wants to
// start the manifold's worker. You can ignore Abort if your worker
// will start quickly -- it'll just be shut down immediately, nbd --
// but if you need to mess with channels or long-running operations
// in your StartFunc, Abort lets you do so safely.
Abort() <-chan struct{}
// Get returns an indication of whether a named dependency can be
// satisfied. In particular:
//
// * if the named resource does not exist, it returns ErrMissing;
// * else if out is nil, it returns nil;
// * else if the named resource has no OutputFunc, it returns ErrMissing;
// * else it passes out into the OutputFunc and returns whatever error
// transpires (hopefully nil).
//
// Appropriate types for the out pointer depend upon the resource in question.
Get(name string, out interface{}) error
}
Context represents the situation in which a StartFunc is running. A Context should not be used outside its StartFunc; attempts to do so will have undefined results.
type Engine ¶
type Engine struct {
// contains filtered or unexported fields
}
Engine maintains workers corresponding to its installed manifolds, and restarts them whenever their inputs change.
func NewEngine ¶
func NewEngine(config EngineConfig) (*Engine, error)
NewEngine returns an Engine that will maintain any installed Manifolds until either the engine is stopped or one of the manifolds' workers returns an error that satisfies isFatal. The caller takes responsibility for the returned Engine: it's responsible for Kill()ing the Engine when no longer used, and must handle any error from Wait().
type EngineConfig ¶
type EngineConfig struct {
// IsFatal returns true when passed an error that should stop
// the engine. It must not be nil.
IsFatal IsFatalFunc
// WorstError returns the more important of two fatal errors
// passed to it, and is used to determine which fatal error to
// report when there's more than one. It must not be nil.
WorstError WorstErrorFunc
// Filter, if not nil, will modify any fatal error reported from
// Wait().
Filter FilterFunc
// ErrorDelay controls how long the engine waits before starting
// a worker that stopped with an unknown error. It must not be
// negative.
ErrorDelay time.Duration
// BounceDelay controls how long the engine waits before starting
// a worker that was deliberately stopped because its dependencies
// changed. It must not be negative.
BounceDelay time.Duration
}
EngineConfig defines the parameters needed to create a new engine.
func (*EngineConfig) Validate ¶
func (config *EngineConfig) Validate() error
Validate returns an error if any field is invalid.
type FilterFunc ¶
FilterFunc is an error conversion function for errors returned from workers or StartFuncs.
type IsFatalFunc ¶
IsFatalFunc is used to configure an Engine such that, if any worker returns an error that satisfies the engine's IsFatalFunc, the engine will stop all its workers, shut itself down, and return the original fatal error via Wait().
type Manifold ¶
type Manifold struct {
// Inputs lists the names of the manifolds which this manifold might use.
// An engine will attempt to start a worker independent of the availability
// of these inputs, and will restart the worker as the available inputs
// change. If a worker has no dependencies, it should declare empty inputs.
Inputs []string
// Start is used to create a worker for the manifold. It must not be nil.
// The supplied GetResourceFunc will return ErrMissing for any dependency
// not named in Inputs, and will cease to function immediately after the
// StartFunc returns: do not store references to it.
//
// Note that, while Start must exist, it doesn't *have* to *start* a worker
// (although it must return either a worker or an error). That is to say: in
// *some* circumstances, it's ok to wrap a worker under the management of a
// separate component (e.g. the `worker/agent` Manifold itself) but this
// approach should only be used:
//
// * as a last resort; and
// * with clear justification.
//
// ...because it's a deliberate, and surprising, subversion of the dependency
// model; and is thus much harder to reason about and implement correctly. In
// particular, if you write a surprising start func, you can't safely declare
// any inputs at all.
Start StartFunc
// Filter is used to convert errors returned from workers or Start funcs. It
// can be nil, in which case no filtering or conversion will be done.
//
// It's intended to convert domain-specific errors into dependency-specific
// errors (such as ErrBounce and ErrUninstall), so that workers managed by
// an Engine don't have to depend on this package directly.
//
// It *could* also be used to cause side effects, but remember to be careful;
// from your perspective, it'll be called from an arbitrary goroutine.
Filter FilterFunc
// Output is used to implement a GetResourceFunc for manifolds that declare
// a dependency on this one; it can be nil if your manifold is a leaf node,
// or if it exposes no services to its dependents.
//
// If you implement an Output func, be especially careful to expose sensible
// types. Your `out` param should almost always be a pointer to an interface;
// and, furthermore, to an interface that does *not* satisfy `worker.Worker`.
//
// (Consider the interface segregation principle: the *Engine* is reponsible
// for the lifetimes of the backing workers, and for handling their errors.
// Exposing those levers to your dependents as well can only encourage them
// to use them, and vastly complicate the possible interactions.)
//
// And if your various possible clients might use different sets of features,
// please keep those interfaces segregated as well: prefer to accept [a *Foo
// or a *Bar] rather than just [a *FooBar] -- unless all your clients really
// do want a FooBar resource.
//
// Even if the Engine itself didn't bother to track the types exposed per
// dependency, it's still a useful prophylactic against complexity -- so
// that when reading manifold code, it should be immediately clear both what
// your dependencies *are* (by reading the names in the manifold config)
// and what they *do* for you (by reading the start func and observing the
// types in play).
Output OutputFunc
}
Manifold defines the behaviour of a node in an Engine's dependency graph. It's named for the "device that connects multiple inputs or outputs" sense of the word.
func SelfManifold ¶
SelfManifold returns a manifold exposing a running dependency engine's Installer and Reporter services. The returned manifold is intended for installation into the engine it wraps; installing it into other engines may have surprising effects.
type OutputFunc ¶
type OutputFunc func(in worker.Worker, out interface{}) error
OutputFunc is a type coercion function for a worker generated by a StartFunc. When passed an out pointer to a type it recognises, it will assign a suitable value and return no error.
type Reporter ¶
type Reporter interface {
// Report returns a map describing the state of the receiver. It is expected
// to be goroutine-safe.
//
// It is polite and helpful to use the Key* constants and conventions defined
// and described in this package, where appropriate, but that's for the
// convenience of the humans that read the reports; we don't and shouldn't
// have any code that depends on particular Report formats.
Report() map[string]interface{}
}
Reporter defines an interface for extracting human-relevant information from a worker.
type StartFunc ¶
StartFunc returns a worker or an error. All the worker's dependencies should be taken from the supplied GetResourceFunc; if no worker can be started due to unmet dependencies, it should return ErrMissing, in which case it will not be called again until its declared inputs change.
type WorstErrorFunc ¶
WorstErrorFunc is used to rank fatal errors, to allow an Engine to return the single most important error it's encountered.
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