Actor Templates, Actor & Service

Actor templates

An actor template defines the full life cycle from pre-installation and installation to upgrades and monitoring of a service.

More specifically an actor template describes:

• The parameters to configure a service
• How to configure the service
• How to get stats from the service
• How to export/import the data

All this is described in the actor template files:

• actor.hrd
• schema.hrd
• actions.py

Actor

An actor template becomes (or is "coverted" into) an actor when it gets copied into a local repository, where it will be used for actually deploying one or more instances of the services.

Since an actor is copied into an Repo, it is version controlled.

Service

A service is a deployed unique instance of an actor.

For example a Docker application running on a host node is an service instance of an actor template for that Docker application, for which there is a version-controlled actor specific to that environment.

Read the section about the Life cycle of an service instance for more details.