In its current incarnation, conftool only supports two object types:

• nodes, describing single applications in a service pool
• service, describing the corresponding service

What we want is to extend its behaviour so that any generic object type can be added programmaticaly, via a schema file.

Schema files should allow to add objects with different characteristics, and also allow the same syncronization mechanism that we use now: define which objects are present from yaml files, and - for specific objects - also the content of objects themselves.

The objects in the schema will have the following format:

<object-name>:
   path: <base-path>
   tags: [tag1, tag2]
  schema:
     field1: { type: string, default: <field1-default-value> }

So we need to define the base path on the kvstore for an object class, the tags needed to describe the object itself, and a schema with a dict of fields, their type and default value.

As far as types are concerned, I think we can limit ourselves to a series of simple ones, namely:

• integer
• string
• boolean
• list
• dictionary/hash

relationships between such objects can be described as dependencies: for example, nodes depend on a corresponding service being defined. Those can be listed as well., and will determine the order of syncronization between the on disc structures and the live data.