Wednesday, October 31, 2018

We were discussing the use of object storage to stash state across workers from applications and cluster nodes on a lease basis in the previous post
This section is not exclusive to Ticketing layer and is mentioned here only for convenience. We suggested earlier that tickets may be issued with any existing planning and tracking software in the ticket layer over object storage. There is no dearth of choices for such software in the market. Almost any tracking software that can issue tickets will suffice. This allows for easy integration with existing software so that applications may leverage their favorite API to create, update and resolve tickets.
In addition, each ticket may have rich metadata that can be annotated by parties other than the workers who create, update and resolve tickets. Such metadata may carry any number of fields to improve the tracking information associated with the objects in the object storage. They could also assist with the update of metadata to objects in the object storage. Such metadata brings many perspectives other than that of the initiator to the users
As long as the tickets are open, they can also maintain links with IDs of resources in systems other than the ticket issuing software. This allows for integration of ticket layer with several other production software that helps navigation from a ticket representing the lease to information in other systems that may have also have additional state for the workers that opened the tickets. This gives a holistic view of all things relevant to the workers merely from their read-write data path
The schema for arranging integrations this way with existing tickets is similar to a snowflake pattern. Each link represents a dimension and therefore the ticket is a representation of all information and not just itself. This pattern also facilitates the independence of the ticket from another system that can go down. The links may only be used if they are available to be reached. Since the ticket itself holds enough information locally about the resource tracking, any external links are nice to have and not mandatory.

This kind of extensibility allows ticket layer to grow without disrupting the path above or below. Since the workers remain unaffected, there is no limit to the extensibility in this layer.

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