Hardware profiles

Each deltacloud driver exposes a fixed set of hardware profiles (HWP). HWPs replace the original 'flavor' concept.

A hardware profile consists of an architecture (e.g. i386 vs x86_64), number of CPUs, memory size and storage size.

hwp_name is accepted as a parameter when POSTing to the instances collection.

A profile can define some of its properties as a range or an enum. In these cases, the client may choose from the range or enum when creating an instance. The client specifies its choice using a parameter in the POST and the available parameters are advertised in hardware profile properties using the <param/> element.

There is the notion of a default hardware profile if the user doesn't specify any when creating an instance. The default profile is chosen by using the first profile which matches the image's architecture.

Some driver defines profiles statically e.g.:

  define_hardware_profile('m1.small') do
    cpu                1
    memory             1.7 * 1024
    storage            160
    architecture       'i386'
  end

An example of using ranges and enums:

  define_hardware_profile('m1-large') do
    cpu                2
    memory           (7.5*1024 .. 15*1024), :default => 10 * 1024
    storage          [ 850, 1024 ]
    architecture     'x86_64'
  end

You can also define a hardware profile with no properties:

  define_hardware_profile 'opaque'

The rackspace driver defines profiles dynamically by querying for available flavors:

  results = racks.list_flavors.map do |flav|
    HardwareProfile.new(flav["id"].to_s) do
      architecture 'x86_64'
      memory flav["ram"].to_i
      storage flav["disk"].to_i
    end

The terremark driver makes all properties configurable with a single profile:

  define_hardware_profile 'default' do
    cpu   [1,2,4,8]
    memory  [512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192]
    storage (1..500).to_a
 end