conman

CONfiguration MANager

Preface

Configurations are a integral part of any software, things get more complicated when the software we are talking about has a microservice based architecture.

With microservices, each service has to have its own configuration, it has to be isolated and secure in a sense that other services running on the same platform must not be able to read it. Also, the service / software must only be able to read it and not modify and so on.

Configuration must not be treaded as another piece of data because it is not. Also, configuration are owned by different set of user than the data, for example, suppose identity services needs a configuration called password-hash-key. The service will use this to hash passwords and hence is quite sensitive information and has to be owned by the a different identity source. It would not be wise to store it in same database or pass it as cli arguments (or environment variables), also a service in charge of sending email should not be able to read such information.

Concept

(tool) -> (authentication/authorization) -> (storage) -> (push) -> (service)

That's it, in a nutshell. It translates to

Hence,

(conman) -> (storage) -> (conman-driver) (service)

What's in the box

• RESTful server (Feature set exposed as RESTful api)
• The cli (fully featured, runs on linux, osx and windows)
• driver (specially designed etcd wrapper with intuitive api)
  • golang
  • (will support more languages if need be)

Feature set

Authentication / Authorization

• Initialize and reset the storage
• Login / Logout

Manage settings

• Define configuration setting schema
• Set / Delete / Enable / Disable configuration settings
• Exporting / Importing configuration bundle

Manage users

• Add / Delete / Enable / Disable users
• Permission descriptor for users