GOCDB/Release4/Development/VSites
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Virtual Sites
Introduction
Virtual sites are a mechanism to arbitrarily group existing service endpoints together. The service endpoints themselves will still belong to their parent (non-virtual/physical) sites. This feature has originally been requested at https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=987.
Virtual Site Entity
A virtual site is a new GOCDB entity containing the following information:
- Name
- Description
- Contact E-Mail
- Monitored flag (Y/N)
- Child service endpoints
- Roles held over the virtual site
Cardinality
A single service endpoint may belong to many parent VSites and a VSite may have many child service endpoints. The existing cardinality between (non-virtual) sites and service endpoints remains: a service endpoint may only have one parent (non-virtual) site.
PI Queries
We will introduce two new PI queries containing virtual site information:
get_virtual_sites
Parameters:
- vsitename - Only return info for a specific virtual site
- scope - Only return virtual sites that are (In)visible to EGI
Example Output: XML
get_virtual_sites_roles
Parameters:
- dn - Limit results to user with given certificate DN
Example output: XML
Roles
When a user creates a virtual site they will be granted the role "Virtual Site Administrator" over the site. Other users will be able to request a "Virtual Site Administrator" role over the virtual site and the administrator will be able to accept or reject these requests as they see fit using the standard role management mechanism.
Security
Any user can create a virtual site. When adding service endpoints to the site we will show a message saying: "Before adding service endpoints to this virtual site please ensure you have permission from the affected service endpoint administrators". We recommend this is defined as a formal procedure for creating a virtual site.
User Interface
The following changes will be made to support virtual sites in the user interface:
- New link: "Add Virtual Site" added to the left hand menu bar
- New link: "View Virtual Sites" added to the left hand menu bar
- When viewing a virtual site the properties listed in "Virtual Site Entity" above will be shown
- My Sites will show virtual sites administered by the current user
Limitations
- A virtual site cannot have a child service endpoint that doesn't already have a parent site.
- A role granted over a virtual site does NOT give any permission over child service endpoints.
Questions
- VO and VSites: ATP uses a similar concept to VSites called [https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/ATPVOFeeds#ATP_VO_TOPOLOGY_FEEDS
VO Topology Feeds] to group services according to supported VO. A single VO feed XML file defines which GOCDB services are supported by a particular VO. VSites could be used to reproduce this functionality if VO names could be entered in GOCDB.