Port and Process resource abstractions?

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Ohai Chefs,

I have downloaded the monit and firewall cookbooks, and I can see that
they use various strategies to allow other cookbooks to configure
monitoring or setup firewall rules.

That is the monit cookbooks, typically define a monitrc resource which
can be used in other cookbooks such as mysql; so

monitrc “mysql” do
port 3306
pid /some/path/to/pid.file
end

or the fire wall offers a rule like so;

firewall_rule “mysql” do
port 3306
networks 10.0.0.0/8
end

But wouldn’t it make sense to offer that abstraction at a higher level,
and promote Process and Ports to the resource level, and rather than
couple your app to monit as above, just have your mysql::server recipe
declare the resources that monit might use.

port “mysql” do
port 3306
networks 10.0.0.0/8
end

process “mysql” do
pidfile /some/path/to/pid.file
end

And monit can come and enumerate any ports and pids that it should be
monitoring from the node in its monit::install recipe… The same
applies to the firewall cookbook. Its not like there are not some very
well used common abstractions in monitoring and fire-walling
applications already…

Any suggestions on whether someone has done this already, and why it
might not make sense to do this would be appreciated…?

Thanks,
Tom

2

On Jan 25, 2012 5:29 AM, "Tom H" tom@limepepper.co.uk wrote:

Any suggestions on whether someone has done this already, and why it
might not make sense to do this would be appreciated...?

Initial thoughts while sitting at an airport. Where do you draw the line of
what you include in this abstractation? What if you want to open a firewall
rule but there is nothing for monit to monitor? If you use something more
complex like nagios, where do you put the additional attributes for
controlling the plugin that is used for monitoring or the notification
levels?

As you generalize what you would do for every port, you have to choose
between limiting your options or creating an interface that quickly grows
complex.

In this situation we have added an 'options' attribute to some resources
which passes unique options back to the providers.

Bryan