[Bro-Dev] [Bro-Commits] [git/bro] topic/actor-system: First-pass broker-enabled Cluster scripting API + misc. (07ad06b)

[Azoff, Justin S]

> On Nov 2, 2017, at 1:22 PM, Siwek, Jon <jsiwek at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Nov 1, 2017, at 6:11 PM, Azoff, Justin S <jazoff at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> - a bif/function for efficiently broadcasting an event to all other workers (or data nodes)
>> -  If the current node is a data node, just send it to all workers
>> -  otherwise, round robin the event to a data node and have it send it to all workers minus the current node. 
> 
> In the case of broadcasting from a worker to all other workers, the reason why you relay via another node is only because workers are not connected to each other?  Do we know that a fully-connected cluster is a bad idea?  i.e. why not have a worker able to broadcast directly to all other workers if that’s what is needed?

Mostly so that workers don't end up spending all their time sending out messages when they should be analyzing packets.

>> If &synchronized is going away script writers should be able to broadcast an event to all workers by doing something like
>> 
>>   Cluster::Broadcast(Cluster::WORKERS, event Foo(42));
>> 
>> This would replace a ton of code that currently uses things like worker2manager_events+manager2worker_events+ at if ( Cluster::local_node_type() == Cluster::MANAGER )
> 
> The successor to &synchronized was primarily intended to be the new data store stuff, so is there a way to map what you need onto that functionality?  Or can you elaborate on an example where you think this new broadcast pattern is a better way to replace &synchronized than using a data store?
> 
> - Jon

I think a shared data store would work for most of the use cases where people are messing with worker2manager_events.

If all the cases of people using worker2manager_events+manager2worker_events to mimic broadcast functionality are really just
doing so to update data then it does make sense to just replace all of that with a new data store.

How would something like policy/protocols/ssl/validate-certs.bro look with intermediate_cache as a data store?


— 
Justin Azoff