Overview

Candlepin 2.0 will involve a massive data model change affecting how products, subscriptions, and pools are stored. Previously, products were a global entity across the entire Candlepin server, there would be only one record for any given product ID. Custom products would have to be created in this global namespace, which is a bit odd and not desirable in a multi-tenant scenario. On import, one tenant could trigger certificate regenerations for another tenant if an updated version of the product came in.

High Level Changes

  1. A large upgrade process is provided which will migrate all existing data to each org that uses it.
  2. Product data will now always be cached in Candlepin’s database, it is no longer queried from service adapters in production.
  3. Each org which uses a product will have its own copy of that product. A product will exist only once in an org.
  4. Subscriptions as a model object will no longer be in Candlepin’s database. They are used only as transient objects during import.
  5. Manifest import and refresh pools have been largely combined into one operation. Importing will bring in both the customer’s latest subscriptions and product data, not just one or the other.
  6. Custom subscriptions are no longer necessary, you can create custom pools directly for custom content you wish to expose.
  7. Client facing API calls remain unchanged as does their JSON response, to keep clients in the wild functioning properly. Some API calls used only by portal/Satellite may need updating.

Benefits

  1. Custom content can be created only for the org which wishes to use it.
  2. Dramatic reduction in data duplication in the candlepin database. (no more copying data from subscription to pool, and copying all product data onto every pool that uses it)
  3. One org importing a manifest can no longer affect, or trigger certificate regenerations, in other orgs.
  4. Eliminates issues in portal where subscription data might be out of sync with product service changes, leading to very strange bugs and a requirement to refresh pools for the customer. Now, all subscription and product data will be pulled during the import.
  5. Gained referential integrity for pools and products.

Database Upgrade

To facilitate storing products and product content in a per-org manner, several changes to the database and object model have been made. While the normal deployment process will make these changes automatically, any existing tooling and/or scripts will need to be updated in accordance with the changes listed below.

  1. Several per-org versions of existing tables are created. These tables are created with a “cp2_” prefix rather than the “cp_” prefix. The new tables also somewhat standardize table name pluralization and column name underscore usage. Affected tables include: *cp_activation_key_product, cp_branding, cp_content, cp_content_modified_products, cp_env_content, cp_installed_products, cp_pool_branding, cp_pool_products, cp_pool_source_sub, cp_product, cp_product_attribute, and cp_product_certificate
  2. cp_pool is updated with several new fields to hold information previously owned by subscriptions.
  3. For each organization, existing products referenced by pools or subscriptions owned by the current organization are copied to the new cp2_products table with a reference to the new org and a new UUID. Any reference within the database to a product is made using the UUID with enforced referential integrity.
  4. Any per-product data are then copied to the new per-org tables for each product in the current organization. This currently includes product attributes and content, certificates and activation keys.
  5. Next, per-org pool data, such as branding, are migrated.
  6. Finally, data which were previously only associated with subscriptions are migrated to the new fields in cp_pool. This includes upstream object references, subscription certificates and CDN details.

At the time of writing, the deprecated tables, and any data contained therein, are left as-is in the database. While these tables will be entirely unused, they will be retained for a period to ensure a failed or incomplete migration can be manually fixed or completed if necessary. These tables will eventually be dropped in a future update.

Changes for Customer Portal

  1. IT must first roll out the most last 0.9.x build.
    • This build contains an API call which will “prime” the product/content tables in Candlepin, which are currently empty. It should be safe to call this API repeatedly to pickup new products and content.
    • The data in these tables is not used by Candlepin at this time, it will be used during the Candlepin 2.0 upgrade however.
    • This should be tested in stage to make sure it can successfully import all products and content from the product service.
  2. A pre-upgrade API call is provided that will populate the currently empty and unused cp_product and cp_content tables in Candlepin.
    • This iterates all known product IDs and their content, and stores them directly in Candlepin’s database. (these tables exist today but are empty in production) This will be to seed the data so we can re-use the main upgrade we developed for Satellite here as well, which will copy each of these products into every org which has pools that use them.
    • Will need to coordinate closely to figure out how best to roll this out.
  3. We would like to test the database upgrade against a copy of the production database sooner rather than later as it’s difficult for us to anticipate what will happen with full mysql prod data.
  4. Refresh pools will now pull latest subscription and product data in for the org. Product service adapter memcached layer may be able to go away if you wish.

Changes for Satellite

  1. API calls for creating custom products and content have changed to owner-/org-specific URLs. (i.e. POST /owners/:key/products/:product_id instead of POST /products/:product_id). Products and content can still be retrieved without the organization, but only using the product’s or content’s UUID (GET /products/:product_uuid). When fetching content using its UUID, the request must be made with an admin-level account.
  2. Refresh pools API is no longer relevant in Satellite will no-op. Uses of it should be removed.
  3. You may continue creating custom Subscription objects. Each subscription will be assigned an ID which you can store, or later find by looking for the primary pool for the subscription. Issuing a delete or update on this subscription ID can be used to control all pools created for the Subscription.
  4. Subscription created/updated/deleted events will no longer be sent on the bus. If you’re listening for these in any capacity, that code should be switched to listen for pool events.
  5. Retrieving product certificates should be done with an org-specific call (GET owners/:owner_key/products/:product_id/certificate instead of GET products/:product_id/certificate). The owner may be omitted, but only if the product is referenced by its UUID (GET /products/:product_uuid/certificate).

Migrating to Candlepin 2.0

Migrating to Candlepin 2.0 from an earlier version is similar to standard upgrade done with the included deployment scripts. Though, due to the extensive nature of the changes made in this version, it is highly recommended to use additional tooling to ensure the upgrade and migration goes as smoothly as possible.

To begin, make sure the local database is populated by running the “populate DB” task. This is only required in hosted environments and will no-op in standalone environments, so it’s safe to do if you’re unsure whether or not it’s necessary.

curl -k -u admin:admin "https://localhost:8443/candlepin/admin/pophosteddb"

Wait a bit for the task to finish (or periodically check the job status via /jobs/{job_id}), then take a snapshot of the environment with the cmv utility.

cd ~/devel/candlepin/server
./bin/cmv snapshot

Note: The cmv utility operates by caching the received JSON for later comparison. Depending on the size of your data set, it may require a large amount of disk space to snapshot the entire deployment. For comparison, a snapshot of the Candlepin test data is around 900 kib for three organizations with 85 products and 25 contents.

Once the snapshot is finished, a normal upgrade can be done via the deploy script.

./bin/deploy

Finally, the migration can be verified with the cmv tool. While cmv can be run without any parameters, there are several expected changes/warnings that can be safely ignored (more on this below). To exclude all the expected warnings, the following command can be used:

./bin/cmv verify --exclude orgs.pools.providedProducts.id --exclude orgs.pools.providedProducts.created --exclude orgs.pools.providedProducts.updated --exclude orgs.pools.productAttributes.id --exclude orgs.pools.productAttributes.productId --exclude orgs.pools.productAttributes.created --exclude orgs.pools.upstreamPoolId --exclude orgs.pools.upstreamEntitlementId --exclude orgs.pools.upstreamConsumerId --exclude orgs.products.uuid --exclude orgs.products.href --exclude orgs.products.productContent.content.uuid --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProductAttributes --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProductAttributes.id --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProductAttributes.productId --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProductAttributes.created --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProductAttributes.updated --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProvidedProducts.id --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProvidedProducts.created --exclude orgs.pools.derivedProvidedProducts.updated

With this command, the verification should complete without any errors or warnings. If so, the migration was completed successfully. Otherwise, steps may be necessary to manually complete the migration, or it may be necessary to roll back and try again.

Expected CMV Warnings

As noted above, there are several expected changes that will show up in a vanilla cmv verify during migration to Candlepin 2.0. Most are related to minor changes in the JSON returned by API calls, while a few others relate to precision issues with the migration to new database tables.

  • orgs.pools.providedProducts
  • orgs.pools.derivedProvidedProducts

The providedProducts and derivedProvidedProducts fields used to be populated directly by Candlepin’s internal model objects, all of which have an ID and created and updated timestamp fields. With the migration to Candlepin 2.0, some collection objects have been converted to DTOs which lack these fields. As a result, the id, created and updated fields are no longer present in the API response.

  • orgs.pools.productAttributes
  • orgs.pools.derivedProductAttributes

The product attribute values no longer include internal-use model details such as the ID and raw timestamps for created and updated times. Instead, the timestamps provided are standardized timestamps which no longer include milliseconds.

  • orgs.products.uuid
  • orgs.products.productContent.content.uuid

In the transition to per-organization products and content, both objects received a new identifier to allow multiple organizations to represent different states of the same products.

  • orgs.products.href

With products now being per-organization, the URL used to refer back to a given product has been updated to reference the product via UUID rather than just RHID (which is not unique between organizations). This change is now reflected in the product JSON.

  • orgs.pools.upstreamPoolId
  • orgs.pools.upstreamEntitlementId
  • orgs.pools.upstreamConsumerId

In Candlepin 2.0, the subscription object has been relegated to a transient DTO used only during pool refresh and manifest import. These fields, which point back to upstream data sources, have been moved to the pool object.

Last modified on 1 March 2024