Inline Expansion

A place for everything, and everything has it's place.

Thus far the examples have all used references by naming the referred resource. It is also possible to define the content of a resource directly inside the referrer. This is called inline referential expansion and is useful when declaring resources that are entirely encapsulated by a resource. The following example for a virtual machine shows how inline expansion can be used to declare disks and nics within a vm (not a complete blueprint):

compute:
  vm:
    example:
      admin_password: (( admin_password ))
      admin_username: adminuser
      cores: 2
      disks:
        data:                  # inline "data" disk definition
          size: 256 GB
        log:                   # inline "log" disk definition
          size: 64 GB
          type: hdd
      memory: 4 GB
      nics:
        external:              # inline "external" nic definition
          firewall: example-firewall
          ips:
            - private:
                type: dynamic
              public:
                type: static
          subnet: example-public
        internal:              # inline "internal" nic definition
          ips:
            - private:
                ip: 10.0.100.4
                type: static
          subnet: example-backend
      tags:
        wicked: cool

The property definitions for disks and nics are references, however in this case instead of declaring the disks and nics at the top level of the blueprint and then adding their blueprint name, we can define them directly inside the virtual machine using them.

The order in which the disks and nics are defined in this example determines the order in which they are presented to the consuming resource. All blueprints respect the order of definition.

Inline definitions cannot use the count property to expand. We're working on it...

The inline definitions get expanded by the blueprint loader into their canonical form (and applying autonaming rules), and a classic reference with a fully qualified blueprint path is left behind to connect the resources:

Blueprint Path	Becomes
compute.vm.example.disks.data	storage.disk.example-data
compute.vm.example.disks.log	storage.disk.example-log
compute.vm.example.nics.external	compute.nic.example-external
compute.vm.example.nics.internal	compute.nic.example-internal