With VMware Aria Automation Assembler extensibility, you can assign an extensibility action or workflow to an event by using subscriptions. When the specified event occurs, the subscription initiates the action or workflow to execute.
Workflow Extensibility
To extend the application life cycle, you can use VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator workflows with VMware Aria Automation Assembler. With the VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator integration, you can use your existing on-premises workflows with extensibility subscriptions.
VMware Aria Automation Assembler uses the VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator integration to import and link workflows to a subscription. You can create, modify, and delete workflows by using the VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator client. Workflows are maintained on the VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator server instance.
VMware Aria Automation Assembler supports the integration of multiple VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator instances that can be used in workflow subscriptions. You can manage which VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator integration is used in workflow subscriptions by using project extensibility constraints and capability tags.
With both soft and hard extensibility constraints on a project, you can manage which VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator integrations are used in cloud template provisioning for the project. Capability tags are also used to manage which VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator integrations are used in workflow subscriptions.
For example, when you deploy a cloud template, VMware Aria Automation Assembler uses the capability tags, associated with a cloud account, for example, cloud:private and region:us-west-1, to manage what VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator integrations are used in workflow subscriptions.
The use of workflows and event subscriptions is not in the scope of this design. The design for VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator is in the scope of the design. See VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator Design for Private Cloud Automation for VMware Cloud Foundation.
For information about integrating your VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator workflows into the provisioning life cycle, see the VMware Aria Automation documentation.
Action-based Extensibility
To automate extensibility actions, you can use lightweight action-based extensibility code within VMware Aria Automation Assembler. To extend your application life cycle, you can assign an extensibility action to a VMware Aria Automation Assembler subscription.
Action-based extensibility (ABX) provides a lightweight and flexible run-time where you can define small scripted actions and configure them to initiate during particular events provided through the Event Broker Service (EBS). ABX supports Node.js, Python, and PowerShell run-time environments.
You can create or import extensibility action scripts in VMware Aria Automation Assembler and assign them to subscriptions. Similarly to workflows, the extensibility action script triggers when an event included in an extensibility subscription occurs. Extensibility action scripts are used for lightweight integrations and customization. ABX is a scripted function through an on-premises VMware Aria Automation provider or a public cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services Lambda or Microsoft Azure Functions. ABX is an alternative method to using workflows that are hosted on-premises using a VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator server.
You can create extensibility actions by either writing a user-defined action script code or importing a predefined script code as a ZIP package.
Action-based extensibility and the use of event subscription are not in the scope of the design. For information about integrating ABX into the provisioning life cycle, see the VMware Aria Automation documentation.
Decision ID |
Design Decision |
Design Justification |
Design Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
PCA-VAA-CA-CFG-027 |
Use the embedded on-premises functions-as-a-service (FaaS) provider in VMware Aria Automation for action-based extensibility. |
You can use the native VMware Aria Automation functions-as-a-service provider for the execution of lightweight actions through event subscriptions without the requirement for a public cloud account provider, such as Amazon Web Services Lambda or Microsoft Azure Functions. |
The use of action-based extensibility requires the VMware Aria Automation instance to have outbound access to the Internet to pull container images from publicly available Internet repositories, for example, to resolve any dependencies included in the actions. If VMware Aria Automation is deployed on an isolated network that does not allow outbound traffic to the Internet, an HTTP proxy must be configured and applied using the vracli proxy command option. |
