architect-api 0.4

architect-api is a server API and UI of Architect, the service modeling, management and visualization platform.

The aim of this project is to provide unified service modeling, management and visualization platform agnostic of delivery method. It creates virtual representations of any software services or physical resources and allows control over their entire life-cycle. The name of project comes from Architect program in Matrix movie series:

In the Matrix the Architect is a highly specialized, humorless program of the machine world as well as the creator of the Matrix. As the chief administrator of the system, he is possibly a collective manifestation, or at the very least a virtual representation of the entire Machine mainframe.

The The Architect project was started as part of my thesis “Visualization of cloud performace metrics”. Now we explore the possible implications of combining the relational models of infrastructures with quantitative data that relates to it.

Following figure shows high-level achitecture of Architect system.

You can find installation instructions, getting started guides, and API documentation at https://architect-api.readthedocs.io/.

Architect Components

The Architect project consists of 4 core compontents (inventory, manager, monitor and document). A quick summary of properties, capabilities and integrations for each component.

Inventory Component

Inventory is the Architect’s metadata engine. It encapsulates and unifies data from various metadata sources to provide inventory metadata for various orchestration services. Basically serves as metadata proxy with clients. It works best integrated with http://salt-formulas.readthedocs.io/.

Currently supported metadata backends are:

• salt-formulas

• reclass (python3 version)

The currently supported customers of metadata provided by Inventory using architect-api client library are:

• SaltStack

• Ansible

• Puppet

• Chef

Following orchestrators have direct support for injecting context metadata:

• Heat

Manager Component

Manager is the Architect’s orchestration engine. The aim of this module is to enforce infrastructure topologies models and acquire live infrastructure topology data from any resource provider for further relational and quantitative analysis and visualisations.

The pull approach for querying endpoint APIs is supported at the moment, the processing push from target services is supported for SaltStack events.

Currently supported resource providers are:

• Kubernetes clusters

• OpenStack clouds

• Heat templates

• Amazon web services

• SaltStack infrastructures

• Terraform templates

• Jenkins pipelines

Monitor Component

Monitor is the Architect’s monitoring engine. It can connect to multiple data endpoints and subject them for further analysis. We can define queries for quantitative data or time-series in Document component.

Currently supported time-series databases are:

• Graphite

• ElasticSearch

• Prometheus

• InfluxDB

Document Component

Document component is responsible for analysis and visualization of infrastructure resources in form of directed graph. We can perform several transformation functions on this graph data. The other part is analysis of quantitative data provided by monitoring solutions and corellating it to the relational structures provided by Manager component.

Currently supported relational visualization layouts:

• Adjacency matrix

• Arc diagram

• Force-directed graph

• Hierarchical edge bundling

• Hive plot

• Circle packing

• Node-link tree (Reingold-Tilford tidy trees, dendrograms)

• Partition layout (sunburst, icicle diagrams, treemaps)

• Sankey diagram

Currently supported quatitative visualization layouts:

• Line chart

• Bar chart, stacked bar chart

• Horizon chart

• Donut chart, pie chart