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@title Drydock User Guide
@group userguide
Drydock, a software and hardware resource manager.
Overview
========
WARNING: Drydock is very new and has many sharp edges. Prepare yourself for
a challenging adventure in unmapped territory, not a streamlined experience
where things work properly or make sense.
Drydock is an infrastructure application that primarily helps other
applications coordinate during complex build and deployment tasks. Typically,
you will configure Drydock to enable capabilities in other applications:
- Harbormaster can use Drydock to host builds.
- In the future, Differential will be able to use Drydock to perform
server-side merges.
Users will not normally interact with Drydock directly.
What Drydock Does
=================
Drydock manages working copies, build hosts, and other software and hardware
resources that build and deployment processes may require in order to perform
useful work.
Many useful processes need a working copy of a repository (or some similar sort
of resource) so they can read files, perform version control operations, or
execute code.
For example, you might want to be able to automatically run unit tests, build a
binary, or generate documentation every time a new commit is pushed. Or you
might want to automatically merge a revision or cherry-pick a commit from a
development branch to a release branch. Any of these tasks need a working copy
of the repository before they can get underway.
These processes could just clone a new working copy when they started and
delete it when they finished. This works reasonably well at a small scale, but
will eventually hit limitations if you want to do things like: expand the build
tier to multiple machines; or automatically scale the tier up and down based on
usage; or reuse working copies to improve performance; or make sure things get
cleaned up after a process fails; or have jobs wait if the tier is too busy.
Solving these problems effectively requires coordination between the processes
doing the actual work.
Drydock solves these scaling problems by providing a central allocation
framework for //resources//, which are physical or virtual resources like a
build host or a working copy. Processes which need to share hardware or
software can use Drydock to coordinate creation, access, and destruction of
those resources.
Applications ask Drydock for resources matching a description, and it allocates
a corresponding resource by either finding a suitable unused resource or
creating a new resource. When work completes, the resource is returned to the
resource pool or destroyed.
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