There are two major development use cases that use configuration bundles: development on the Rhino platform such as TAS services, Sentinel services, and development of management tools.
When developing a new service, it is useful to write or export a configuration bundle that can be used for testing. For automated testing this may be templated with the test setup tool substituting values as required for the test environment. Performing test setup in this manner is particularly useful for container-based deployment.
Management tools can loosely be divided into two categories: ones that manipulate configuration bundles to provide a service-specific configuration interface, and ones that operate on the state of the Rhino cluster using the declarative configuration management operations. Some examples of tools are:
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Sentinel VoLTE config-converter – a tool that generates configuration bundles for Rhino from simplified high-level configuration documents describing the operator and site-specific attributes of a Sentinel VoLTE deployment.
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Initconf – a daemon for managing cloud-based Rhino clusters. Initconf is responsible for ensuring that newly started Rhino VMs are correctly configured, and for performing controlled shutdown of nodes.
Configuration bundle manipulation tools are often task specific and frequently work with configuration fragments, creating, modifying and combining them into a configuration bundle for import into Rhino. They use the configuration-bundle YANG schema to structure and validate the generated fragments.
Rhino management tools can be task specific, such as a simple importer that only uses the ConfigManagementMBean methods to import a configuration bundle and wait until the system state has converged or general such as the rhino-console.
Management tools should use the configuration operations operating on desired and actual state in preference to the imperative operations, such as ServiceManagementMBean.activate().
Import tools should parse the JSON document returned by ConfigManagementMBean.importConfiguration() to provide useful feedback to the user.
Validation errors, in particular, need to be printed with the ID of the associated component.
Feedback on the progress of convergence can be provided by using the component management MBeans to get the status of components having an activation state delta in the returned success document.
