Proposals

We've got it all backwards: enabling Pacemaker management application development

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One Line Summary

A proposal for making cluster management more easily accessible for 3rd party management software developers.

Abstract

The currently available management tools for Pacemaker — the CRM shell, the Python GUI, DRBD MC, HAWK — all use a “cluster-centric” approach. They are primarily concerned with the management of the cluster resources as such. They merely “tie in” with the applications they are intended to control — as opposed to a management utility being focused on the application, and tying in with cluster management.

While this is great for a systems administrator who is familiar with clustering technologies, it’s a nightmare for the MySQL DBA, the file server admin, the storage guy who “just wants HA” for their application. This is a major entry barrier for HA in scenarios where it could be easily deployed — if we made it accessible in a sane way.

It’s obvious that we HA developers are not intimately familiar with MySQL management tools, Samba management tools, iSCSI management tools. So it’s clear that we’re not the right people to update those tools to weave HA in; that would probably be a recipe for disaster. But, we can make cluster management more easily accessible to developers of application management software, so it becomes easy for them to weave HA management into the tools they write. This presentation makes a proposal as to how we can achieve that.

Speaker

  • Florian Haas

    LINBIT

    Biography

    Florian is a senior consultant, tech writer, blogger, and developer at LINBIT. Working for a 100% Linux High Availability company, he blogs about, and contributes to, Linux clustering development and storage replication. Florian is the principal author of the DRBD User’s Guide and the Linux-HA User’s Guide, a regular contributor to the Linux-HA and DRBD projects, and a frequent conference speaker. He has previously tutored and presented at the MySQL Users Conference and Expo, LinuxTag, LinuxCon, the Tokyo Open Source Conference, and others.

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