Glossary

A

Agent

Processes running on each SnowFox host to provide additional features to SnowFox or infrastructure support processes.

Good examples of agents are:

• Sensu client.
• Salt Stack minion.

C

Component

SnowFox is designed to be extensible at compile time and configurable at runtime.
This is achieved through components: units that add features to SnowFox.

Components can implement the same interface defined in other components and therefore provide a choice of implementation. These implementation can rely on external and third-party products which are considered part of the component itself.

Connector

A connector is an interface for SnowFox to manage and monitor services. Examples are:

• The local connector: to manage and monitor processes on the host.
• The docker connector: to manage and monitor local docker containers.

D

The Daemon process

SnowFox runs as a daemon process by default. The daemon component is what manages the daemonization process and manages the Spawner and Manager processes.

I

Instance

An instance is the unit monitored by SnowFox. This can be a process, docker container, or anything that a connector can register and interact with.

M

The Manager process

The manager process waits for user requests and system events and reacts to them. It runs in non-privileged mode and runs the majority of the code.

All privileged actions are dispatched to the spawner process.

S

Service

A service is a definition to start one or more instances.

The Spawner process

The spawner process is part of the SnowFox daemon and is responsible for performing all priviledged actions.