Porch Consolidation in Nephio R3

[liamfallon]

Porch was ported from Google Container Tools / kptdev project(s) in Q4 2023 to Q1 2024 and it is now a constituent part of Nephio. Porch, as the component that handles the lifecycle of packages, is a central component in Nephio.

The roadmap for Porch is described in this discussion. In the medium to long term there are proposals to re-architecture Nephio including Porch and discussions are ongoing on how the long term architectural roadmap for Nephio and indeed Proch will evolve:

• TKO
• kform

Porch, with its current architecture, will be at the heart of Nephio for at least the next release and possibly for some following releases. There are issues in Porch that require attention for those upcoming releases, so consolation of the current Porch component is required in R3 and possibly for longer. This issue describes the consolidation activities on Porch in Nephio R3 (to be released in May/June 2024).

Identification
The following list (in no particular order) outlines areas to address:

• Porch triage: We do not have a full picture of what all the issues with Porch are. The Porch issues must be all gathered into the Nephio Github project and triaged. Currently there are:
  • 15 open issues with a Porch label in the Nephio github project
  • 5 discussions with a Porch label in the Nephio github project
  • 121 open issues with a Porch label in the kptdev github project
  • problems such as package proposal/approval, caching, update, that are not fully understood and not fully documented in issues
• Identification and addressing functionality that does not work or does not work properly
  • fix/cordon off and fix later/remove

Consolidation

• Code generation, build, unit test, deployment, end to end tests
• Stability testing to verify consistency, Idempotence, and cleanup after delete
• Bug fixing to fix most urgent triaged bugs that are possible to fix with little refactoring
• Refactoring to fix the most urgent problems that require refactoring
• Refactoring to remove functionality that is not working and is not required

Evolution

• Define the architectural evolution of Porch in Nephio beyond R3 in the light of the TKO and kform proposals
• Identify the functionality and how that functionality that will be added/improved/removed as Porch evolves towards its new architecture.

[liamfallon]

Triaged