[Planetlab-devel] federation

[Mark Huang]

David Irwin wrote:
> I was wondering about federation support in MyPLC 1.0/PlanetLab
> Version 4.0.  I didn't see any documentation on the new website that
> discusses how to use federation (is there any?).  I realize the
> rollout is ongoing and this may not be an urgent priority, but I was
> wondering if there is a timeline in mind for supporting other
> independent MyPLCs that wish to use the new federation support.

Federation was a priority for 4.0, and there is support for it in the API now. 
Thierry Parmentelat (at OneLab) and I have been testing it for a while now, with 
moderate success. The basics are:

1. Peers exchange SSL certs and GPG public keys offline.

2. Peers call a single function on their local API servers, which in turn calls 
a single function on the remote API server, which returns a set of "foreign" 
slices, nodes, and user accounts. These "foreign" entities are synchronized and 
cached, non-authoritatively, in the local database, enabling local users to 
create slices on foreign nodes, and foreign users to create slices on local nodes.

3. You currently cannot easily configure the peering policy (i.e., I trust some 
foreign slices/nodes but not others). Of course, you can hack the code to 
implement your own policy if you like.

Documentation, as always, is lagging...

--Mark