[forge-dev] Multitenancy for Forge as a Service

[Max Rydahl Andersen]

> Hey Andrew,
>
> Yes, this is a really important question, and it's something that I 
> believe
> that the Forge architecture supports out-of-the-box. Every interaction 
> with
> the UI API (the Forge commands, per say) is stored in a request-scoped
> UIContext[1] object that is initialized when a command is invoked and
> destroyed when the command finishes executing. That means that you can
> execute multiple concurrent commands in a single Forge instance and 
> they
> will not affect each other.

Excellent.

> When it comes to security, as a good practice, it is important to 
> restrict
> the commands that the exposed REST service can execute.
> That's why in the Obsidian backend[2] we only expose a REST 
> endpoint[3]
> consuming the Forge API to execute a limited number of commands (more
> specifically, the ones exposed by the obsidian-addon[4])
>
> Last but not least, as the Forge Online app is just a PoC illustrating 
> how
> Forge can work in a web environment, it does not impose restrictions 
> to the
> supported commands, therefore it shouldn't be a web app to be used in
> production.

Since we need something for production I would be curious to know what 
you feel are missing ?

> PS: It would be nice to ping the Fabric8 team for this matter as they 
> are
> already using Forge as their project generator solution for a long 
> time now.

In case you missed it - fabric8 team is now part of devtools and 
devtools are fabric8 :)

We'll get James et.al. involved (they are in f2f meetings this week), 
but as I understood
Fabric8 have a fork of the PoC adjusted to handle some more complex 
workflows they were
exploring. Things they would like to get merged back as I understand it.

That said - to outline the items we were discussing about forge as a 
SaaS:

Main reason we need it in first place is that Forge is *massive*, takes  
up a lot of
resources - even more than Eclipse Che; thus we are very interested in 
being able to run
Forge without having one instance per user.

In that we had some questions and concerns in addition to the ones 
above:

A) can forge run without access to download updates etc. from maven and 
similar ?
    i.e. can we lock updates down and ensure it and its execution cannot 
be altered
    just because someone updated a plugin.
    (We discussed firewalling it completely to be sure :)

B) Is there a way to ensure that secrets like GitHub auth keys and 
others are
    not exposed to users nor in logs ?

C) Any expectations/ideas on how we would integrate obsidian generators 
with
    fabric8 ?
     Two options we considered:
	   1) call out to separate hosted obsidian-toaster and run the risk of 
exposing secrets on wire.
       2) run obsidian-toaster or a copy of it inside fabric8 online so 
we don't expose any secrets.

Pete and others might have more, but above are the ones I wrote down 
while being on bluejeans to the conversations.

> I hope this helps. Looking forward to this list of requirements and 
> happy
> to discuss about this anytime.
>
> [1] -
> https://github.com/forge/core/tree/master/ui#uicommand-execution-lifecycle
> [2] - https://github.com/obsidian-toaster/generator-backend
> [3] -
> https://github.com/obsidian-toaster/generator-backend/blob/master/src/main/java/org/obsidiantoaster/generator/rest/ObsidianResource.java
> [4] - https://github.com/obsidian-toaster/obsidian-addon
>
> Best Regards,
>
> *George Gastaldi*
>
> https://onename.com/gastaldi
>
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 9:27 PM, Andrew Lee Rubinger <alr at redhat.com> 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi, all:
>>
>> We have some requests coming down the pike from the Developer Group 
>> with
>> regards to running Forge as a Service (which is great!).
>>
>> Additionally, I'm suspecting this will soon be very important for us 
>> as
>> well, as we continue to build out what's currently known as the 
>> "Obsidian
>> Generator", using Forge as a backend.
>>
>> I'm hoping the Forge team will kindly advise as to our preparedness 
>> for
>> running Forge in a multitenant environment.  Concerns may include 
>> resource
>> consumption (not running an instance-per-user), security, etc.  Have 
>> we yet
>> broached this subject specifically in the prototypes I've seen thus 
>> far
>> using Forge Online?
>>
>> I've requested of the Developer Group a list of requirements they've
>> devised; will send those along here when I have them.  In the 
>> meantime,
>> mind describing where we currently stand?
>>
>> S,
>> ALR
>>
>> --
>> Red Hat Developer Group Architecture
>> @ALRubinger
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/max
http://about.me/maxandersen