Boardwalk has been designed to support long-running background jobs against large number of hosts. Sometimes it's useful to run a common workflow against a host as a one-off. Normally workspaces are scoped to a certain host pattern, but these common one-off workflows might be run against any host. For these cases it's tempting to have a workspace defined with one of these common workflows with a host pattern of all and then use --limit on check/run subcommands to hit a particular host.
There are a couple issues with having a workspace scoped to all hosts:
There are no guard rails. It would be easy to run a workflow against all hosts in the inventory without limit, which may be undesirable
For large environments, the workspace statefile becomes huge and causes boardwalk to run slower
We should consider having better support for this use-case
Boardwalk has been designed to support long-running background jobs against large number of hosts. Sometimes it's useful to run a common workflow against a host as a one-off. Normally workspaces are scoped to a certain host pattern, but these common one-off workflows might be run against any host. For these cases it's tempting to have a workspace defined with one of these common workflows with a host pattern of
alland then use--limitoncheck/runsubcommands to hit a particular host.There are a couple issues with having a workspace scoped to
allhosts:We should consider having better support for this use-case