The Configuration Description, Deployment, and Lifecycle Management (CDDLM) Working Group (WG) will focus on three main topics: a) configuration description of Grid Services; b) deployment of Grid Services on Grid infrastructure; and c) lifecycle management of deployed Grid Services (including failure detection and redeployment if necessary). Legacy applications (not Grid Service-based) are included in our scope and we will address their needs using wrappers.
Chairs: Dejan Milojicic, dejan@hpl.hp.com
Takashi
Kojo, kojo@bk.jp.nec.com
Mailing List: cddlm-wg@gridforum.org
Web Site: TBD
Secretary: Stuart Schaefer, sschaefer@softricity.com
Deploying any complex, distributed service presents many
challenges related to service configuration and management. These range from
how to describe the precise, desired configuration of the service, to how we
automatically and repeatably deploy, manage and then remove the service.
Description challenges include how to represent the full range of service and
resource elements, how to support service "templates", service
composition, correctness checking, and so on. Deployment challenges include
automation, correct sequencing of operations across distributed resources,
service lifecycle management, clean service removal, security, and so on.
Addressing these challenges is highly relevant to Grid computing at a number of
levels, including configuring and deploying individual Grid Services, as well
as composite systems made up of many co-operating Grid Services.
Hence, the proposed WG (CDDLM) will address how to: describe
configuration of services; deploy them on the Grid; and manage their deployment
lifecycle (instantiate, initiate, start, stop, restart, etc.). The intent of
the WG is to gather researchers, developers, practitioners, and theoreticians
in the areas of services and application configuration, deployment, and
deployment life-cycle management and to explore the community need for a
broader effort in this area.
There are many proprietary and open source systems that partially
overlap CDDLM, but there is no consistent and standardized system or method
which interoperates across various platforms, languages, and
services/applications in a secure and reliable way. As examples, an ideal CDDLM
would enable: unified definitions of configuration parameters to replace or
mask the many different configuration notations and access mechanisms in use
today (e.g. XML, ini files, SQL); methods for validation of configurations at
definition- and run-time; system composition from sub-systems; separation of
concerns of functionality and configuration; auto-discovery, self-monitoring,
etc.
Within group there exists extensive experience gained with
one such system, called Smart Framework for Object Groups (SmartFrog). The
intent to release SmartFrog as open source was announced at GGF8. It is a good
starting point to create the specifications which cover applications to other
systems, platforms, and languages. See www.smartfrog.org
for more details.
This group is chartered with the creation of the CDDLM
specifications and it encourages companies and individuals to develop at least
two reference implementations. We hope to accomplish the following
specifications:
1. Configuration Description Language
Specification
2. Intermediate Configuration
Description Language Specification
(Configuration expressed in 1. with inheritance, dependencies, and variables
resolved)
3. Basic Services Specification
4. Component Model Specification (component
representation and implementation)
We hope to accomplish the following milestones:
· March 2004, GGF10:
1.
CDDLM
WG fully formed and core charter members established;
2.
Completion
of draft versions of the documents 1 & 2 above.
· June 2004, GGF11:
1.
Final
drafts of documents 1 & 2;
2.
First
drafts of documents 3 & 4
· October 2004, GGF12:
1.
Final
drafts of documents 3 & 4;
2.
preliminary
reference implementations
· March 2005, GGF13:
1.
Two
interoperable reference implementations complete
· Web & Grid Services
· Applications for utility computing
· Large scale distributed computing
· CMM and OASIS Web Services
Distributed Management (WSDM) TC
· GRAAP WG (WS Agreement)
· Newly proposed BoF on “Grid
Business Processes”
· OGSA WG
·
Evidence of commitments to carry out WG tasks
Dejan Milojicic has an exclusive assignment in his company to
work on the CDDLM; he has a strong management and leadership experience. He and
his group plan to attend all GGF meetings during the CDDLM life span and also
to hold interim working sessions (at least three times a year or on as-needed
basis).
Takashi Kojo is one of the earliest members of the
architecture design of the Business Grid Project which is joint development
effort of Japanese top IT venders of NEC, Fujitsu and
Pre-existing Documents
There are existing documents available on the topic of
SmartFrog, a system that motivated proposal for this working group. The
documents are available off of www.smartfrog.org.
The open source implementation and extensive additional documentation will be
shortly available from the same location.
Exit Strategy
This working group is intended to have a short life-span
because there is already an existing system as a proof point. We hope to use
this extensive experience in order to come up with a Grid-specific
specification and a couple of reference implementations. We believe that we can
achieve this in as early as 18 months, but not longer than 24 months. Our
milestone is to have two reference implementations based on the adopted
specification.
Two dozen people (of approximately three dozen present at
the BoF) expressed their interest in working in the CDDLM-WG, and almost a
dozen of those are prepared to work very closely and contribute to the
CDDLM-WG. In particular, we have William Lee (Lesc, UK); Stuart Schaeffer (Softricity,
US); Fred Maciel (Hitachi, Japan); Takashi Kojo (NEC, Japan); Hiro Kishimoto
(Fujitsu, Japan); Inder Monga (Nortel Canada); Patrick Goldsack, Dejan
Milojicic, and Peter Toft (HPL, UK & US); and Ian Taylor (Cardiff Univ.,
UK). Therefore, we have representatives from three continents, four countries,
and two academic and six industrial institutions.
We have commitments from five companies to pursue three
reference implementations of the CDDLM specifications: the BizGrid project
(Fujitsu, NEC, and
In addition, we have spoken to a number of industrial and
academic organizations which expressed interest in the topics addressed by
CDDLM and which are considering joining this effort. We approached Oracle, BEA,
JBOSS, CERN, UCSD,