[cosmos-dev] RE: SDD, CMDBf, and COSMOS

[Jason Losh <Jason.Losh@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for the pointer.  It looks like the SDD use cases aren't that far off in terms of personas identified since most assume an administrator actor.  The SDD creation tools are where I think we'll pick up the developer persona that you all have also identified.

Thanks,
-Jason

________________________________________
From: Mohsin, Jimmy [Jimmy.Mohsin@xxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 5:59 PM
To: Jason Losh; Valentina Popescu; Mark D Weitzel
Cc: Ali Mehregani; Cosmos Dev
Subject: RE: SDD, CMDBf, and COSMOS

Hi Jason,

As part of the i9 use case definition (http://wiki.eclipse.org/COSMOS_Use_Cases), we have identified two roles till date… These are “Developer” and “System Administrator”.  There may be more roles; I defer to the group in this regard.

Thanks,
Jimmy Mohsin
Cell   +1-609-635-1703

From: Jason Losh [mailto:Jason.Losh@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 5:44 PM
To: Valentina Popescu; Mark D Weitzel
Cc: Ali Mehregani; Mohsin, Jimmy
Subject: RE: SDD, CMDBf, and COSMOS

Hi,

The typical user role for install is an administrator updating a compute system during downtime and/or a provisioning system like TPM doing so as part of a mass update.  Almost all install programs will require administrative access in order to access the appropriate areas of the file system as well as the registry on Windows etc.  That said, unfortunately the existing SDD use cases in large part do not contain actors.  Instead, the generic persona of  "user" is used throughout -- occasionally there are actors identified and in all of those cases I've found so far the actor identified is "administrator."

Have user roles been identified for other areas of COSMOS?  If so can one of you point me to those?  I might be able to marry some of the SDD use cases to those roles.

And to your point about resource models … the SDD itself can support any number of resource models.  The "profile" in SDD terms is what is used to express this.  The expectation is that a runtime processing an SDD will need to take into account resources identified in a profile and act upon them.  I'm thinking that the resource handling will be done via a plug-in type architecture and that we would provide default resource model plug-ins for SML and perhaps CIM as well as publish default profiles for those.  In the event someone wants to use a different resource model like SDM then one "simply" (waving of hands here) provides an SDM profile and plug-in to the runtime for handling SDM defined resources.

As for how the CMDBf API might be used by an SDD runtime, consider what an SDD is capable of deploying.  An SDD can deliver a single piece of small software or it can be used to install complex solutions like DB2, WebSphere or aggregations of both.  Those are resources being deployed into the enterprise environment and as part of installing those resources we may want to provide an MDR that describes those resources and register it with the CMDBf framework.

Of course consider that I'm a COSMOS zygote at the moment and have much to learn so it's possible that my thoughts above don't make sense.  I'm sure you all will educate me if that's the case! :-)

Cheers,
-Jason

From: Valentina Popescu [mailto:popescu@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 11:35 AM
To: Mark D Weitzel
Cc: Ali Mehregani; Jason Losh; jimmy.mohsin@xxxxxx
Subject: Re: SDD, CMDBf, and COSMOS


I think a first step is to define COSMOS SDD usecases based on user roles. If there are already usecases defined by the SDD group then we can use them and update or extend to integrate into the existing COSMOS models and frameworks.
Another thing that we need to get agreement on is the type of resource models COSMOS SDD is planning to support. It seems that the current plan is to use the COSMOS SML Data Center model. If more are to be covered in COSMOS, they need to be called out during the usecase definition phase; for example I see that the primer sample is using CIM.

It's not that clear to me how the CMDBf API is planned to be used by the SDD runtime; I'll probably get the picture if we start with a set of usecases..

Thank you,
Valentina Popescu
IBM Toronto Labs
Phone:  (905)413-2412         (tie-line  969)
Fax: (905) 413-4850

Mark D Weitzel/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS

01/08/2008 09:39 AM

To

jason.losh@xxxxxxx, Valentina Popescu/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA, Ali Mehregani/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA, jimmy.mohsin@xxxxxx

cc

Subject

SDD, CMDBf, and COSMOS






On the SDD call, Jason mentioned that the SDD work has the requirement for a "repository".  Initially, we have talked about having CMDBf APIs on top of this because it smells like a flavor of the configuration information.  Here I'm thinking this would be a use case for the registration APIs and the benefit of a federating CMBD that can reconcile this info.

Jason would like to put together some use cases that describe this.  I've asked that he describe the requirements around the repository as well.  Then, I was thinking the group of us could work with him to hammer out some use cases, and open up some enhancement requests.

Please let me know your thoughts.

-mw

p.s. Jimmy, I was not sure who to invite from the CA team and since you're the default "volunteer"....

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mark Weitzel | STSM | IBM Software Group | Tivoli | Autonomic Computing | (919) 543 0625 | weitzelm@xxxxxxxxxx