[RFE] consumable library for integration with other provisioning agents

[t-lo]

Current situation

The provisioning agent implements all features in a single application.

Impact

Re-using the agent's functionality from other agents like e.g. Afterburn is challenging.
This impacts adoption of the agent by the larger Linux ecosystem and hinders its mission of being a reference implementation for a minimal Azure provisioning guest agent.

Ideal future situation

• The provisioning agent provides a library (rust crate) which is consumable by other projects. (Split common library parts into a separate workspace #39)
• The library is built and tested in CI, versioned releases are published regularly.

Follow-up tasks

• The library is integrated with Afterburn (possibly in a WIP fork).
• Afterburn using the library is integrated with Flatcar to move away from wa-agent supplied guest configuration.
• Extended Afterburn support of Azure using the library is contributed upstream.

[anhvoms]

This sounds great. A few comments:

1. We should produce a library which has all the core functionality and the main application that consumes it so that anyone can just use the whole agent as-is and other agents who are interested only in the functionality can consume the library.
2. We should think about making some of the functionality configurable. As an example: mounting the ISO to retrieve ovf file requires enabling UDF driver in the image, which might not be desirable for some users, especially if he/she does not have a need to provision the VM with password through Azure control plane. By making it configurable, the user can minimally customize the functionality of the agent/binary depending on his/her need

[dongsupark]

I have been looking into this issue.

For separate structure of a common library and a binary that depends on the lib, one approach would be to introduce workspace.
So we can move all libs (distro, goalstate, imds, etc.) to a subdirectory, keeping only src/main.rs in the current form, to combine bin and lib in a top-level Cargo.toml.
ue-rs already has a similar workspace structure.

[dongsupark]

Created a WIP PR #39.

[t-lo]

[heart] Thilo Fromm reacted to your message:

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________________________________ From: Dongsu Park ***@***.***> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2024 4:35:18 PM To: Azure/azure-provisioning-agent ***@***.***> Cc: Thilo Fromm ***@***.***>; Author ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [Azure/azure-provisioning-agent] [RFE] consumable library for integration with other provisioning agents (Issue #33) Created a WIP PR #39<#39>. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#33 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAARRUGGG7D4X6CDUQV23S3YUYO4NAVCNFSM6AAAAABCS63T6WVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSNJXGIZDKOBSGQ>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[dongsupark]

Published v0.1.1 of libazureinit and azure-init.
The 2nd one, The library is built and tested in CI, versioned releases are published regularly is done.