Roboconf Concepts

Roboconf is made up of several blocks.

• The Deployment Manager (or DM) is a web application in charge of managing Virtual Machines (or VM) and the agents.
  It acts as an interface to the set of VMs or devices. It is also in charge of instantiating VMs.

• The Agent is a Software component that must be deployed on every VM and device on which Roboconf must deploy or control something.
  Agents use plug-ins to delegate the manipulation of Software instances. As an example, there are a Bash and a Puppet plug-ins. Roboconf does not reinvent the wheel, it tries to reuse existing and robust solutions. Roboconf agents communicate with each other through the messaging server.

• The Messaging Server is the key component that enable communications between the DM and the agents.
  The DM and the agents always communicate asynchronously through this server.

• Eventually, a REST client is required to control the DM.
  Roboconf comes with a web application which provides a user interface to interact with the DM through REST. If one wants to use or develop another client, the REST API is described in the developer guide.

In terms of model and configuration files, Roboconf has the following concepts.

• The application descriptor contains meta-information about the application.
  Name, version qualifier, description and so on.

• The graph is in fact a set of graphs.
  It define Software components which go from the (virtual) machine to the application package. The graph defines containment relations (a WAR application is deployed over a Tomcat server) and runtime relations (the WAR application needs a MySQL database). The graph is a set of rules that will be used at runtime.

• If the graph defines relations between components, instances represent concrete components.
  As an example, you could have defined a Tomcat component in the graph, and have two instances, one deployed on a machine A, and another one on machine B. These would be two instances of a same component. The rules that apply to them are deduced from the graph, but they have their own configuration.