.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. .. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Introduction to Policy Distribution *********************************** .. container:: paragraph The main job of policy distribution component is to receive incoming notifications, download artifacts, decode policies from downloaded artifacts & forward the decoded policies to all configured policy forwarders. | .. container:: paragraph The current implementation of distribution component comes with built-in SDC reception handler for receiving incoming distribution notifications from SDC using SDC client library. Upon receiving the notification, the corresponding CSAR artifacts are downloaded using SDC client library.The downloaded CSAR is then given to the configured policy decoder for decoding and generating policies. The generated policies are then forwarded to all configured policy forwarders. Related distribution status is sent to SDC at each step (download/deploy/done) during the entire flow. | .. container:: paragraph The distribution component also comes with built-in REST based endpoints for fetching health check status & statistical data of running distribution system. | .. container:: paragraph The distribution component is designed using plugin based architecture. All the handlers, decoders & forwarders are basically plugins to the running distribution engine. The plugins are configured in the configuration JSON file provided during startup of distribution engine. Adding a new plugin is simply implementing the related interfaces, adding them to the configuration JSON file & making the classes available in the classpath while starting distribution engine. There is no need to edit anything in the distribution core engine. Refer to distribution user manual for more details about the system and the configuration.