ipc.md

Inter-process communication

According to the quick architecture discussion session we will have sub processes that are responsible for certain tasks for example networking, or vm. The api should be able to communicate with the individual solutions to pull a solution by combining functionality from the separate components.

A sort of secured, inter process communication is needed, where the api can reach the different components also, handle different signals when an event that require attention. For example a network manager needs to free up a virtual network device when the VM that uses it exits.

We did some research for the best inter-process bus solution we can have, but unfortunately the available solution didn't fit precisely (for exampele DBus, and gRPC). Hence we built our own solution zbus

Overview

The API will receive a DSL that describes a certain service. For example a container. While the dsl is not specified yet, we can have this pseudo dsl script

- container:
    name: container-1
    image: image/id
    require:
        storage:
            # storage specs
        network:
            # network specs

The api, will use the bus to find out who implements the network api, and doing the required calls on the network component (over zbus), then just passing the results to the container component, to do it's part.

In this scenario, the API is a DSL interpreter and a broker that can ask proper components for an object.