[EPIC] Shared Mac Pool Flow Review

[adrianriobo]

Current flow

The current flow is managed by 3 operations:

Request

Request will check if there is any non locked dedicated mac host to spin a new mac machine;

If that is the case it will create the machine using the replace root volume task feature from AWS (to reduce time) and it will create a new credentials for the useer to connect with the new machine. The it also sets the lock to true for the dedicated mac host.

If there is no non locked dedicated mac host and the pool is not full it will create a new dedicated mac host and create the machine on top of it in this case it will not replace the root volume but create the actual machine.

If pool capacity has been reached it will return error.

Release

After the workload is completed for the request it should send a release signal, this will mark the dedicated mac host as non locked, so new request action can pick the dedicated mac host.

Destroy

Currently there is no automation for the actions so this should be invoked from somehere.

Caveat

With current approach the request process is taking care of provision the new workspace on the machiine as so it is taking more time (up to 16 mins).

On the other hand it allows us to change some settings on the machine we are requesting (i.e. different OS version or airgap topology).

New flow

The idea is to focus on speed up the access to the workspace. So we will change the approach from now own the release process will handle the replace volume task operation and request will create and set new credentials for the machine as so the access to the workspace will be reduced to the miimum.

We need the auto-prune strategy in place so we avoid manual intervertion for destroy operation

Also we want to manage the pool capacity with a serverless controller to ensure there will lbe always one free machine (till it reaches a limit for security reasons)