Support non Python based extension providers

[chaostoolkit]

Support non Python based extension providers

[kv-pradeep-zz]

I have recently started using CTK for a product in my organization and I came across this issue during the research. Having the ability in CTK to build custom extensions using python is a great plus. It would be even better if CTK provides ability to have custom extension of a different provider other than python, for example scala in my case. With growing products using CTK for their chaos engineering, I suppose this will soon be a requirement by most. Enabling the provider to run the scripts of different languages by a command that can specified inside the experiment would be fantastic. If the environment has the dependencies of that particular file (java, or scala, or c, etc) the script would run, else it would fail. Having the environment pre-requisites is the reponsibility of the engineers and not of the framework (CTK). Giving an option to run different files by your custom commands would be just fantastic.

[mlafeldt]

I recommend using a network RPC interface over brittle extensions. Both Go and Rust produce statically compiled binaries. See https://www.terraform.io/docs/internals/internal-plugins.html for some inspiration.

[Lawouach]

Although I think a RPC provider would be neat, I'm not sure the network is more reliable than simply calling out an exported function ;)

With that said, it's an interesting approach. My main concern is that some extensions start becoming stateful and more complex than the current interface invites for.

[mlafeldt]

We're talking about local network requests only, of course.

Just take my comment as input, nothing more. I'm pretty indifferent to the outcome, TBH.

[Lawouach]

I think an RPC provider is actually a good idea in general to be honest. That would make the API much more visible to the outside world.

[Lawouach]

Hey @kv-pradeep great suggestion and thank you for updating the issue.

I wonder, would you be able to sketched what this could look like to you?

[Lawouach]

As a reference, I wonder if wasm wouldn't be a nice intermediate way of extending the toolkit outside of Python

https://github.com/wasmerio/python-ext-wasm

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