Sebastian and fellow orchestrators, Some questions have come up recently about issues in the Rook orchestrator module and its state of disrepair. Patrick, Varsha, and I have been discussing these recently as Varsha has been working on the module. Before we fix all the issues that are being found, I want to start a higher level conversation. I’ll join the leads meeting tomorrow to discuss, and would be good to include in the Monday orchestrator agenda as well, which unfortunately I haven’t been able to attend recently... First, Rook is driven by the K8s APIs, including CRDs, an operator, the CSI driver, etc. When the admin needs to configure the Ceph cluster, they create the CRDs and other resources directly with the K8s tools such as kubectl. Rook does everything with K8s patterns so that the admin doesn’t need to leave their standard administration sandbox in order to configure Rook or Ceph. If any Ceph-specific command needs to be run, the rook toolbox can be used. However, we prefer to avoid the toolbox for common scenarios that should have CRDs for declaring desired state. The fundamental question then is, **what scenarios require the Rook orchestrator mgr module**? The module is not enabled by default in Rook clusters and I am not aware of upstream users consuming it. The purpose of the orchestrator module was originally to provide a common entry point either for Ceph CLI tools or the dashboard. This would provide the constant interface to work with both Rook or cephadm clusters. Patrick pointed out that the dashboard isn’t really a scenario anymore for the orchestrator module. If so, the only remaining usage is for CLI tools. And if we only have the CLI scenario, this means that the CLI commands would be run from the toolbox. But we are trying to avoid the toolbox. We should be putting our effort into the CRDs, CSI driver, etc. If the orchestrator module is creating CRs, we are likely doing something wrong. We expect the cluster admin to create CRs. Thus, I’d like to understand the scenarios where the rook orchestrator module is needed. If there isn’t a need anymore since dashboard requirements have changed, I’d propose the module can be removed. Thanks, Travis Rook
