Canvas: being able to disable some canvas features

[ycardon-pro]

Description

As canvas is growing with more and more functionalities (and this is a very good thing !) it should be possible to disable some of the features and being able to run it in a minimal configuration. Benefits would be:

• incremental approach for the newcomers, easier troubleshooting
• lighter deployment, especially when deployed on a workstation, only deploy what you need / what you rely on
• promote a modular approach for the canvas (source code organization, documentation, configuration...) might help contributions

Maybe this feature could be addressed first with documentation / deployments examples... as opposed to code change.

[brian-burton]

This is a good idea and one I've discussed with @LesterThomas. At the moment, we have two versions of the reference implementation that work with and without service mesh, but working without service mesh means we need a certificate generated for the CRD webhook (webhooks must use HTTPS) so we install cert-manager to provide it.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out how we remove the bash scripts that install the canvas and get the whole thing running purely from Helm charts. If we can do that, then we could turn service mesh and cert-manager on and off in the way you describe by enabling/disabling in the Helm chart.

I've already made some documentation changes to this repo to make the structure of the ODA environment specification and the reference implementation a bit clearer, including separating out the installation instructions. We could create installation instructions and environment specifications for different configurations.

I'm happy to have some help getting this to work!

[LesterThomas]

We are doing some work with Issue #323 and usecase UC002-Manage-Components to make the Canvas more modular. We will consider how to enable a on/off toggle for these modules.