Announcing Mistral -- Task Flow as a Service
Today Mirantis announced the official launch of the Mistral project. We have a team to start contributing to the project right away, but we invite anybody interested in task service and state management to join the initiative.
Mistral is a new OpenStack service designed for task flow control, scheduling, and execution. The project will implement the Convection proposal (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Convection) -- the name "Convection" is trademarked by Microsoft, so we've chosen a different name to avoid the Quantum/Neutron problem later -- and provide an API and domain-specific language that enables users to manage tasks and their dependencies, and to define workflows, triggers, and events. The service will provide the ability to schedule tasks, as well as to define and manage external sources of events to act as task execution triggers.
The project will allow integration with the existing task flow library. Mistral will initially expose task flow library functionality through an API by providing a domain-specific language for describing task flow concepts. Going forward there is an intention to extend the DSL to provide a support for additional concepts, such as external events or scheduling rules.
The project page can be found at https://launchpad.net/Mistral.
We will be holding weekly meetings on Mondays at 16:00 UTC on #openstack-meeting at Freenode. If you have any questions or would like to contribute, you can find us on #openstack-mistral.
What we'd like to know is this: what do you use task flow for, or what would you use it for if it were available as a service? Please let us know in the comment section below.
