[OOTB-hive] Thoughts on Honeycomb that need your input

[martin at bettercode.com]

Hehe, well I figured I wanted to get the whole story down in one place
:-)  Unfortunately halfway through I obviously thought I was in the
INFRA channel! :-/

As far as I see it, Honeycomb *is just* a set of extensions, rolled into
a vanilla Alfresco CE, at least as it was originally stated back when we
started, and recently re-stated by Jeff. The puppet thing started out as
a build around which to test said extensions and just kind of
snowballed. That said, we're in a better position now to have something
that we can say *is not* Honeycomb (even though we temporarily
appropriated the name) than if there was nothing there at all right now.
 At least we have something to talk about :-)

Let's be serious though, Alfresco are never going to help us in anything
that looks like it might help CE scale, it would be sailing too close to
their enterprise offering, so I doubt we are going to see anything
helpful there. Like I said, marsbard/docker-alfresco is merely our
(Daren's and I) experimentation in that direction.

Developing with Docker though is super nice compared to puppet. Once you
get a layer locked in there is no more need to "start from scratch", so
the development lifecycle is really fast. It's also really nice that the
end result is a text file, the Dockerfile, and also that you can (but I
didn't) publish the completed image to the (or a) Docker Hub.

We need the build process (i.e. Jenkins) to build not only the
extensions but also alfresco.war, share.war et al and then store them in
our own artifact server. From there we are free to have whatever
installer we want, be it a Dockerfile, puppet manifests, shell scripts
or whatever. Perhaps for example Loftux would prefer to get their war
artifacts from us rather than from potential zombie Patient Zero. I'm
definitely not very keen on using the alfresco-provided installers. So
basically it's all still blocked by the infrastructure. (But you were
right, back then 2 years ago when you said that Docker could have been a
better approach than puppet. If a Dockerfile had appeared back then we
could be having a very different conversation now.)

Cheers
Martin

PS Thanks for your kind comment about my health
-- 
  martin at bettercode.com

On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, at 08:41 AM, Andreas Steffan wrote:
> Wow, what a response!
> 
> No doubt that if we want extensions rolled into Honeycomb, then we will
> need an artifact server.
> 
> The point (at least mine) for Docker is building a distribution and
> shipping with reach - in a simple(!) way. Building and serving the
> extensions we want rolled in is just a small fraction of that work.
> 
> Slicing and dicing an Alfresco system and juggling around with the
> pieces surely is fun and also makes sense at scale. Even though Docker
> 1.12 comes with orchestration support, it is still very complicated -
> and things get worse the smaller the pieces. Docker compose is not
> suitable for production, and things like Kubernetes probably overkill.
> Other than that, there are some nice and easy tricks to get around basic
> container dependency issues. The default installer does not support
> sliced installation, so there is no regression if Honeycomb does not
> support it initially.
> 
> Regarding support for potential slicing of the basic Alfresco CE and the
> work involved with it, that's why I asked about the situation at
> Alfresco. If we are aiming at that, I think they need to be strongly
> involved with this task.
> 
> PS: Glad to hear you are better now.
> 
> cheers
> Andreas
> 
> 
> 
> On 07/12/2016 09:43 PM, martin at bettercode.com wrote:
> > Hi All
> >  
> > tl;dr. Sorry you didn't like my puppetry. Docker's nice like that but
> > you're missing something. If Honeycomb is artifacts then we need an
> > artifact server.  KVM plus Docker + artifact server + Jenkins + an
> > instance or two of Alfresco running would make a party on our server
> > hardware.
> >  
> > Wow, what a thread. I really don't want to pick it all to pieces but
> > I'll say a couple of things.
> >  
> > Firstly, I'm sorry that I have not had a chance to get into this
> > debate sooner. I've been very ill for some weeks, but I am mostly
> > recovered now.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Andreas Steffan
> 
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