vcf-services

⚠️ Important

The current MQTT communication architecture, including the VCF Automation Provider Management message broker and MQTT framework, is subject to change in future VCF Automation releases. To ensure long-term compatibility, account for these possible upcoming changes when designing extensions within the extensibility framework.

Overview

VCF Automation Provider Management uses a traditional message broker to support many of the extensibility platform capabilities. A message broker comes pre-bundled with the product. The protocol used for communication is MQTT - mqtt3.1.1 and mqtt5.0 are supported.

Establishing a connection

• web socket at {vcfa.host}/messaging/mqtt

Characteristics of the broker capabilities

• embedded brokers in each cell (VCF Automation Provider Management instance) of a cell group are clustered
  • brokers “forward” messages between themselves if necessary; for ex. when one client is connected on cell A and publishes to a topic, and there is another client connected on Cell B which is subscribed to the same topic, it will receive the message
• QoS=0,1,2 are supported, and
  • QoS=1,2 - message loss may occur in case the broker stops
  • QoS=0 - message loss may occur even in case of network hiccups
• clean start/session=true
  • clean start=false is not supported, because the broker does not keep any persisted state, meaning on crash or restart any durable session will be forgotten
  • default message expiration is 5 minutes(unless the broker holding the message is stopped before then)
• cannot be used as a generic broker
  • messages flow from VCF Automation Provider Management outward(notifications), or
  • request/response on strictly defined topics(extension services)
• authentication
  • extension services -> user=extension service triplet, pass=extension token(get from RESTapi /cloudapi/1.0.0/tokens, type=EXTENSION)
  • notifications -> user=user@organisation, pass=session jwt(perform a regular login at RESTapi to obtain jwt)

Message Schema

• meta information describing how the payload is encoded(payload is a json/xml encoded string, etc); the type sometimes dictates the payload type(BEHAVIOR_INVOCATION=>InvocationArguments), but other times it is additionally specified by headers.contentType
  • the reason for this structure is that payloads with varying schemas may float over the same topic; this means that your application may need to cope with messages which it is not interested in(and ignore them, rather than fail)

    {
    "type": "EVENT|EXTERNAL_EVENT|TASK|EXTENSION_TASK|API_REQUEST|API_RESPONSE|BEHAVIOR_INVOCATION|BEHAVIOR_RESPONSE",
    "headers": {},
    "payload": ""
    }
    

    Note:

    This pattern is used throughout the extensibility platform and various features may themselves encode their payloads in terms of meta info+encoded payload in the main payload; for ex. BEHAVIOR_INVOCATION wraps HalfDuplexEnvelope in its payload(InvocationArguments.arguments) as a json encoded string.

Configuring a client

• handling connection hiccups(subscriptions must be re-established “manually”)
• handling password expiration(token, jwt, etc)
• working around known bugs of popular clients(paho)

Best practices

• mission critical applications integrating notifications should have a mechanism to periodically check for missed events and should not solely rely on QoS(or clean start)
  • extension developers must find balance between the frequency of the check and the QoS level that is used; the higher the QoS the less frequent the check may need to be; for most situations QoS=1 should be good enough, unless the check is very expensive to make; QoS=2 may be used as last resort, as that is very taxing on the broker and may lower the overall performance of VCF Automation Provider Management itself
• QoS should be viewed as levels of guarantee that a message transfer between broker and client will succeed, but it does not directly guarantee a message transfer between a publisher and a subscriber
• applications may need to implement additional logic to cope with duplicated messages for QoS=1 (at least once)

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