pulumi/docs/metadata.md

Mu Metadata Specification

This document contains a formal description of Mu's metadata. For more details on how this metdata is compiled when targeting various cloud providers, please refer to the companion design document.

Overview

The essential artifact a developer uses to create Stacks and Services is something we call a Mufile. It is conventionally named Mu.yaml, usually checked into the Workspace, and each single file describes a Stack. (Note that Stacks may internally contain other Stacks, however this is purely an implementation detail of how the Stack works.)

TODO(joe): declarative specification format for Clusters.

Although all examples are in YAML, it is perfectly valid to use JSON instead if that is more desirable.

Mu preprocesses all metadata files to substitute context values not known until runtime, such as configuration, arguments, and so on. The Go template syntax is used for this. Please refer to the API documentation for the context object (TODO(joe): do this) for details on what information is available.

Package Managament

Each Mufile begins with some standard "package manager"-like metadata, like name, version, description, and so on. As with most package managers, most of these elements are optional:

name: elk
version: 1.0.1
description: A fully functioning ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
author: Joe Smith <joesmith@elk.com>
website: https://github.com/joesmith/elk

TODO(joe): finish this section.

Security

TODO(joe): we need the ability to override the default Role/ACLs/etc.

Stacks and Subclassing

A Stack may subclass any other Stack, specializing aspects of it as appropriate. This facilitates reuse. For instance, perhaps my company wishes to enforce that certain best practices and standards are adhered to, for all Stacks. Or imagine someone in the community has published a best-in-breed Node.js application blueprint, leveraging Express, MongoDB, and the ELK stack, and I merely want to plug in my own application logic and leverage the overall Stack.

To do this, reference another Stack's fully qualified name in the base property:

base: some/other/stack

From there, I can use all of the other metadata in this section, however we will have inherieted anything in the base.

TODO(joe): what about mixins?

TODO(joe): get more specific about what can be overridden. Furthermore, what about "deletes"?

APIs

Every Stack may choose to export one or more APIs. These APIs can be standard "unconstrained" network interfaces, such as "HTTP over port 80", or can take on a more structured form, like leveraging OpenAPI to declare a protocol interface. The benefits of declaring the full interfaces are that the RPC semantics are known to the system, facilitating advanced management capabilities such as diagnostics, monitoring, fuzzing, and self-documentation, in addition to RPC code- generation. This also adds a sort of "strong typing" to the connections between Services.

TODO(joe): articulate this section further; e.g., the metadata format, precise advantages, etc.

Stack Constructors

Each Stack can declare a set of constructor parameters that callers must supply during creation:

parameters:

Each parameter has the following properties:

• name: A name unique amongst all parameters.
• description: An optional long-form description of the parameter.
• type: A parameter type, restricting the legal values.
• default: A default value to be supplied if missing from the caller.
• optional: If true, this parameter is optional.

The set of types a parameter may take on are "JSON-like". This includes simple primitives:

type: string
type: number
type: boolean
type: object

As well as array shapes utilizing them:

type: [ string ]
type: [ number ]
type: [ boolean ]
type: [ object ]

Complex structures can be described simply using objects with properties:

name: tag
type:
    id: number
    name: string
    value: object

The most interesting feature here is the ability to request a "capability", or reference to another Service. This provides a strongly typed and more formal way of expressing Service dependencies, in a way that the system can understand and leverage in its management of the system (like ensuring Services are created in the right order). It also eliminates some of the fragility of weakly typed and dynamic approaches, which can be prone to race conditions.

The most basic form is to use the special type service:

type: service

This is helpful, as it exposes a dependency to the system, but it isn't perfect. The shape of the dependency is still opaque to the system. A step further is to express that a specific port is utilized:

type: service:80

This declaration says that we require a Service with an exposed port 80. This strong typing flows through the system, permitting liveness detection, and even compile-time type checking that the supplied Service argument actually does expose something on port 80 -- in the event that this ever changes, we will find out upon recompilation.

Even better still is to declare that we depend on a specific kind of Service, by specifying the fully qualified name of a Stack. In such a case, the system ensures an instance of this Stack type, or subclass, is provided:

type: examples/keyValueStore

This hypothetical Stack defines an API that can be used as a key-value store. Presumably we would find subclasses of it for etcd, Consul, Zookeeper, and others, which a caller is free to choose from at instantiation time.

Another example leverages the primitive mu/volume type to require a Service which can be mounted as a volume:

type: mu/volume

The simple form of expressing parameters is name: type:

parameters:
    first: string
    second: number

The long-form, should other properties be used, is to use an array:

parameters:
    - name: first
      type: string
      ...
    - name: second
      type: number
      ...

Finally, note that anywhere inside of this Mufile, we may access the arguments supplied at Stack instantiation time using the Go template syntax mentioned earlier. For example, {{.args.tag.name}}.

Configuration

TODO(joe): write this section.

Services

After that comes the section that describes what Services make up this Stack:

services:

In this section is zero-to-many Services that are co-created with one another. Each Service has:

• A name, both for dynamic and static use.
• A type, which is just the name of a Stack to instantiate.
• A visibility governing whether consumers of this Stack have access to it or not.
• One or more named arguments, mapping to the Stack's constructor parameters.

Although these Services are co-created, they may reference one another. The references between each other forms a DAG and the system topologically sorts that DAG in order to determine the order in which to create and destroy Services. Notably there may be no cycles. By default, the system understands liveness and health (TODO(joe): how); as a result, the developer need not explicitly worry about races, liveness, or retries during Service creation.

Names

A Service's name can be set in one of two ways. The simplest is to use the "default", derived from the Stack type. For example, in the following metadata, the single Service has type nginx/nginx, gets a default name of nginx:

services:
    public:
        nginx/nginx:
            port: 80

Note that this is the latter part of the name; something called elasticsearch/kibana would get a name of kibana.

If we wish instead to give this an explicit name, say www, we can do so using the type property:

services:
    public:
        www:
            type: nginx/nginx
            port: 80

A Service's name is visible at runtime (e.g., in logs, diagnostics commands, and so on), in addition to controlling how metadata cross-referenes that Service. All Services live within a Stack, which of course has a name. Inside of a Stack, this outer name becomes its Namespace. For instance, inside of a Stack named marapongo/mu, a Service named x has a fully qualified name (FQN) of marapongo/mu/x. Although we seldom need the FQN for references within a single Stack, they are sometimes needed for inter-Stack references, in addition to management activities.

Types

Each Service has a type, which is merely the name of another Stack. Most of the time this is the FQN, although for references to other Stacks defined within the same Mufile (more on that later), this can just be a simple name. During instantiation of that Service, a fresh instance of that Stack is created and bound to in place of this Service name.

Although there are obviously many opportunities for ecosystems of user-defined Stacks, and indeed a rich library offered by the Mu platofrm itself, we eventually bottom out on a core set of "primitive" constructs.

The primitive types are in the mu namespace and include:

• mu/container: A Docker container wrapped in Mu metadata.
• mu/gateway: An API gateway and/or load balancer, multiplexing requests onto multiple target Services.
• mu/func: A single Function ordinarily used for serverless/stateless scenarios.
• mu/event: An Event that may be used to Trigger the execution of another Service (commonly a Function).
• mu/volume: A volume stores data that can be mounted by another Service.
• mu/autoscaler: A Service that automatically multi-instances and scales some other target Service based on policy.
• mu/extension: A logical Service that extends Mu by hooking into events, like Stack provisioning, and taking action.

TODO(joe): link to exhaustive details on each of these. TODO(joe): consider a mu/job (e.g., ECS's RunTask); unclear on how this would differ from mu/func. TODO(joe): consider a mu/daemon type, similar to Kube's DaemonSet abstraction.

Although these may look like "magic", each primitive Stack simply leverages an open extensibility API in the platform. Most interesting tasks may be achieved by composing existing Stacks, however, this extensibility API may be used to define new, custom primitive Stacks for even richer functionality. TODO(joe): more on this.

Finally, note that a companion namespace, mu/x also exists, that offers more cloud-neutral platform abstractions.

Visibility

At this point, a new concept is introduced: visibility. Visibility works much like your favorite programming language, in that a Stack may declare that any of its Services are public or private. This impacts the accessibility of those Services to consumers of this Stack. A private Service is merely an implementation detail of the Stack, whereas a public one is actually part of its outward facing interface. This facilitates encapsulation.

For instance, perhaps we are leveraging an S3 bucket to store some data in one of our Services. That obviously shouldn't be of interest to consumers of our Stack. So, we split things accordingly:

services:
    private:
        aws/s3:
            bucket: images
    public:
        nginx/nginx:
            data: s3
            port: 80

In this example, S3 buckets are volumes; we create a private one and mount it in our public Nginx container.

Constructor Arguments

TODO(joe): describe the argument binding and verification process.

Nested Stacks

Another feature that comes in handy sometimes is the ability to create nested Stacks:

stacks:

Each nested Stack is very much like the Stack defined by any given Mufile, except that it is scoped, much like a nested/inner class in object-oriented languages. Doing this lets you subclass and/or multi-instance a single Stack as multiple Services inside of the same Mufile. For example, consider a container that will be multi-instanced:

stacks:
    private:
        - common:
            type: mu/container
            image: acmecorp/great
            env:
                NAME: {{.meta.name}}-cluster
                DATA: false
                MASTER: false
                HTTP: false

Now that we've defined common, we can go ahead and create it, without needing to expose the Stack to clients:

services:
    private:
        - data:
            type: common
            env:
                DATA: true
    public:
        - master:
            type: common
            env:
                MASTER: true
        - worker:
            type: common
            env:
                HTTP: true

All of these three Services -- one private and two public -- leverage the same acmecorp/great container image, and each one defines the same four set of environment variables. Each instance, however, overrides a different environment variable default value, to differentiate the roles as per the container's semantics.

Different scenarios call for subclassing versus composition, and the Mu system supports both in a first class way.

TODO(joe): we need to decide whether you can export public Stacks for public consumption. At this point, my stance is that you must create an entirely different Stack to do that. This keeps things simple for the time being.

Target-Specific Metadata

Although for the most part, metadata strives to be cloud provider-agnostic, there are two ways in which it may not be. First, some Stack types are available only on a particular cloud, like aws/s3/bucket (and any that transitively reference this). Attempting to cross-deploy Stacks referencing such things will fail at compile-time, for obvious reasons. Second, some metadata can be cloud provider-specific. For example, even if we are creating a Service that is logically independent from any given cloud, like a Load Balancer, we may wish to provider cloud-specific settings. Those appear in a special metadata section and are marked in such a way that erroneous deployments fail at compile-time.

More details on target-specific Stacks and metadata settings are provided below in the relevant sections.