acme-portal-sdk

Important: This SDK is currently in alpha and primarily for demonstration purposes. APIs may still change frequently.

SDK to provide data and actions for acme-portal VSCode extension.

Rather than embedding a pre-defined logic in acme-portal extension, the SDK allows to define sources of data and behaviour for extension functionality. As such, the extension servers as UI layer to the implementation provided by SDK objects.

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Problem

A repeatable source of pain while working on software is that deployment processes are highly specific to a given project. While the application may be written in a well known language or framework, the deployment process is usually specialized to a given application, team and company making it difficult for new and existing team members to understand how to just "ship" their code.

acme-portal and acme-portal-sdk attempt to address that problem by proposing a standard UI & workflow of deploying a python application. However, rather than dictating an exact deployment implementation, the two packages jointly define only high level deployment concepts and allow users to customize the implementation.

In a way, they attempt to make the deployment process as frictionless and intuitive as possible, without simplifying the deployment to a restrained set of practices.

acme-portal-sdk contains abstract interfaces expected by the VSCode acme-portal extension. It also contains a specific implementation for a python application based on the prefect orchestration library. Users of the SDK can easily extend the abstract interfaces to their projects. Some standard implementation schemes like one based on e.g. airflow can be made part of SDK in the future.

Concepts

To the end of clarifying deployment process, the SDK defines the following concepts:

• Flow - (often named in various frameworks as Workflow / Job / DAG) is a unit of work in an application. It can also be though of as an executable script or entrypoint. A Flow can have sub-elements like Steps / Tasks / Nodes, but those are not tracked by the SDK. Flows form a basis of what unit of computation is deployed. In this way an application is composed of multiple related Flows maintained by the team, with a desire to deploy them independently of each other.
• Deployment - is a piece of configuration defined in an execution environment (e.g. Prefect/Airflow Server, a remote server, some AWS Resources) that defines how to run a unit of work (a Flow). Deployment is then capable of orchestrating physical resources (by e.g. submitting requests, having execute permissions) and generally use environment resources to perform computation.
• Environment - (sometimes called Namespace, Version, Label) is a persistent identifier of an application version run in a given Deployment. Popular Environment names used are dev, tst, uat, prod. Environment names are useful to communicate release state of a given feature (and its code changes) in an application release cycle. They give meaning to statements like "those changes are in dev only", "this feature needs to be tested in uat", etc.

Having those concepts defined the SDK defines the following actions:

• Find Flows - scan code or configration to find Flows which can be deployed
• Find Deployments - find existing Flow deployment information
• Deploy - uses information about the Flow together with additional deployment configuration to create a Deployment in an initial, starting environment (e.g. dev).
• Promote - having completed required validation steps on deployment outputs in a given environment, the code version used in source Deployment can be deployed to a target environment (e.g. from dev to uat)

The acme-portal VSCode extension then displays flow and deployment infromation and provides UI elements (buttons, forms) / VSCode tasks to trigger Deploy and Promote actions.

The SDK and acme-portal are intended to complement use of CICD pipelines in cases where deployments can not be fully automated.

For explanation on how to configure your project to work with acme-portal using the SDK, checkout Configuring SDK for your project

For explanation of the features provided by default prefect based implementation checkout Default functionality of prefect based implementation

See guide Using default prefect based functionality for how to configure your project to work with acme-portal using the default prefect based implementation. You can view a sample project using it under acme-prefect.