On Policy in the Data Center: Congress
By Tim Hinrichs and Scott Lowe with contributions from Alex Yip, Dmitri Kalintsev, and Peter Balland
(Note: this post is also cross-published at RuleYourCloud.com, a new site focused on policy.)
In the first few parts of this series, we discussed the policy problem, we outlined dimensions of the solution space, and we gave a brief overview of the existing OpenStack policy efforts. In this post we do a deep dive into one of the (not yet incubated) OpenStack policy efforts: Congress.
Overview
Remember that to solve the policy problem, people take ideas in their head about how the data center ought to behave (“policy”) and codify them in a language the computer system can understand. That is, the policy problem is really a programming languages problem. Not surprisingly Congress is, at its core, a policy language plus an implementation of that language.
Congress is a standard cloud service; you install it on a server, give it some inputs, and interact with it via a RESTful API. Congress has two kinds of inputs:
- The other cloud services you’d like it to manage (for example, a compute manager like OpenStack Nova and a network manager like OpenStack Continue reading