Miscellaneous Developers' Topics

At this developers session, we will hear updates about several issues relating to developing GENI aggregates and standardizing aggregate behavior. Specific topics are expected to include the status of the Aggregate Manager API and RSpecs, VLAN stitching implementation status, and common Clearinghouse APIs. This session will begin conversations that will be continued at the several Developers Working Sessions and the Coding Sprint session.

Schedule

Sunday, 1:30pm - 3pm

Session Leaders

Aaron Helsinger GPO	Tom Mitchell GPO

Agenda / Details

• Introduction. Overview of the track of GEC17 Developer Sessions.

• AM API and RSpec topics. State of current AM API implementations and proposed extensions.

• OpenID and AuthN with GENI Portal. How to use OpenID to use the GENI Portal to authenticate tools, and how OpenID works within the GENI Portal.

• Tool Integration Wish-list. A discussion of capabilities that could be provided by GENI services to make the development of future experimenter-focused tools more efficient.

Pre-Requisites

None

Background Reading

• AM API
  • AM API v3 Specification
  • Adopted and Draft AM API v4 Changes
• RSpecs
  • Design Notes
  • Compute Ontology​
• ​Omni
• Network Stitching Design Notes

Session Summary

At the Miscellaneous Developer Topics Session, we heard from Aaron Helsinger and Tom Mitchell on the status of several efforts, and then had an open discussion on things that tool developers would like to see from aggregates and clearinghouses.

Aaron presented the status of the Aggregate Manager API v3 implementation, with a plea for more progress from aggregate developers, particularly to support Update(). He also presented the status of RSpecs and Omni.

Tom Mitchell discussed how to integrate tools into the larger GENI infrastructure, particularly through the use of OpenID for Single Sign On.

Marshall Brinn introduced the question of what support tool developers would like from aggregates and clearinghouses in order to support GENI experimenters. We then had an open discussion, where several requests and suggestions were made.

In general, tools would like a way to know when something changes in a slice - the slivers in the slice, expiration times, etc. A callback function was suggested instead of requiring polling. Alternatively, GENI could identify the authoritative source(s) of all kinds of information and ensure those sources have API methods for querying state.

Other requests included:

• Common libraries, particularly for handling authentication and authorization in GENI
• Standards among tools, for things like how long to cache state
• Improved documentation