minutes-2008-07-29

Date: July 29, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM EDT
Attendees: Mark Blair, Roshan (Credit Suisse), Ted Ross (Red Hat)

In this meeting, we began talking concretely about the management model for AMQP. Ted supplied links to the protocol and management model documents for the Qpid implementation. These can be found on the "working documents" page on the Wiki.

We discussed at some length the contents of the Qpid model and the protocol that works with it. Some highlights:

• Management-related communication is through a dedicated topic exchange (the management exchange).
• Changes in object properties are "published" onto the exchange.
• Changes in object statistics are "published" at intervals.
• Methods with input/output arguments may be invoked on objects.
• The model has a namespace called "package" that allows for extensibility.
• Classic Get/Set commands are supported.
• Class-specific events will be supported soon.
• Binding keys can be used by consoles to control what type of information is received.
• The protocol is tolerant of the existence of multiple different versions of the schema.

Mark noted the lack of "vertical" control over content. In other words, it is desirable for a Get operation to be able to specify which columns it is interested in in order to save bandwidth. This is a good feature for AMQP Management.

Modeling of AMQP security was discussed:

• It was agreed that management of Policy/Entitlements is out of scope for this SIG.
• Management of users/identity is out of scope?
• Is management access/control needed for the SASL mechanism list?

Mark suggested that for scoping, we focus first on access to model attributes and method invocation, and later on events and threshold alerts.

Action for next week's call:

We will begin a comparative analysis of the model in terms of

1) The stated requirements
2) The CML/iMatix model
3) The Qpid model

in order to come to a detailed canonical management model.

Mark will tackle "broker" and "connection" objects, Ted will do "queue" and "exchange". We will put this information in a tabular form on the Wiki for discussion