Robinhood Policy Engine is a file system management tool developed at CEA. Its original purpose was to manage purges in scratch file systems, which it can still do powerfully, and then Lustre/HSM where it plays a crucial role. Robinhood maintains a database (MySQL/MariaDB, for now) containing information about all entries of the file system. Each entry (file, directory, symlink, etc.) is associated to numerous (flexible) tags and values. Complex state machines can be defined to manage the entries' lifecycle and automatically run policies at large scale. Therefore, the tool can now handle extremely diverse management and reporting tasks on large file systems.
After recalling the basic concepts and features of the tool, we will present v3 in more depth. This latest version, which we released last year, introduced "generic policies" and a plugin mechanism. Combined together, these features allow innovative usages, some of which we have implemented and many more that still have to be designed and shared. We will illustrate how system administrators can use "generic policies" for fine-grained reporting or to define new workflows using configuration only, and developers - vendors in particular - can enrich their solutions with new plugins.
Robinhood is driven by a vibrant community, which works exemplary well. Robinhood developers have a strong Lustre background, either as sysadmins or core developers. We will present the numerous changes that we contributed back to Lustre to improve the efficiency and flexibility of Robinhood. The last section of the talk will focus on the ongoing development and what to expect in the future versions of Robinhood Policy Engine.
