Automatic Data Plane Registration on Start-up

[ghost]

Setup

We deployed some EDC instances using different methods like docker-compose or helm charts. In such a setup, we separated into one data plane and one control plane with a postgreSQL database.

The Problem

Our goal is to create a setup that can be used with a simple docker-compose up which creates a working stack. The docker-compose.yml looks like this:

version: '3.8'

services:
  control-plane:
    ...
  data-plane:
    ...
  postgres-control-plane:
    ...

After starting this stack, we always have to register the consumer data plane manually by calling the control plane endpoint https://control-plane.example.com/api/v1/dataplane/instances with the following payload:

{
    "edctype": "dataspaceconnector:dataplaneinstance",
    "id": "http-data-plane",
    "url": "CONSUMER-DATA-PLANE-CONTROL/transfer",
    "allowedSourceTypes": [
        "HttpData", "HttpProvision"
    ],
    "allowedDestTypes": [
        "HttpData", "HttpProxy"
    ],
    "properties": {
        "publicApiUrl": "CONSUMER-DATA-PLANE-PUBLIC"
    }
}

This manual step is unfortunately somewhat laborious. To solve this problem, we created a simple init script to automate the process and integrate it into the docker-compose setup by adding another container that is only used for this control plane initialization:

version: '3.8'

services:
  control-plane:
    ...
  data-plane:
    ...
  postgres-control-plane:
    ...
  init-data-plane-control-plane:
    ...

Possible Solution

To prevent this manual step, it would be great to find a possibility to automatically register the data plane at the control plane. Perhaps by adding another attribute(s) in the configuration file with the url. On startup, the above mentioned endpoint could be called automatically and the payload could be filled with the configuration attribute(s). This would eliminate the manual call / the initialization container.

Would be great if we can discuss this proposal or think about other solutions!

[ndr-brt]

Another solution could be to provide an extension to the data-plane that will call the data-plane-resolver endponit and register itself at the startup.
I'm not sure that this could be something to integrate in the upstream, but we'd happy to review an eventual proposal.

[ndr-brt]

I presented the same question in a more succinct way: #2198