Use ephemeral nodes

An ephemeral node is ideal for temporary or auto-scaling deployments. It is a temporary node that you do not have to provision manually first, and it disappears from the workspace when the connection to the platform ends.

Using ephemeral nodes requires that you define a workspace token, a shared secret that you pass to the node so that it can self-register. You can define a workspace token in your workspace configuration:

workspaces:
  static0:
    name: Tenzir
    # Other configuration...
    token: wsk_e9ee76d4faf4b213745dd5c99a9be11f501d7009ded63f2d5NmDS38vXR

For improved security, store the token in a separate file:

workspaces:
  static0:
    name: Tenzir
    # Other configuration...
    token-file: /run/secrets/workspace_token

This approach works well when you use Docker or Kubernetes secrets.

Deploy an ephemeral node

To spawn an ephemeral node, create a configuration file with the workspace token:

tenzir:
  token: wsk_e9ee76d4faf4b213745dd5c99a9be11f501d7009ded63f2d5NmDS38vXR
  platform-control-endpoint: http://tenzir-platform.example.org:3001

Then run the node with this configuration:

tenzir-node --config=config.yaml

Workspace Token Format

A valid workspace token starts with the string wsk_, continues with 24 bytes of hex-encoded randomness, and ends with the base58-encoded workspace id.

More precisely, the Tenzir Platform CLI generates a workspace token according to the following logic:

import os
import base58

def print_workspace_token(workspace_id: str) -> None:
    base58_workspace_id = base58.b58encode(workspace_id.encode()).decode()
    random_bytes = os.urandom(24).hex()
    print(f"wsk_{random_bytes}{base58_workspace_id}")

The tenzir-platform tools generate-workspace-token command generates a valid workspace key using exactly this logic. However, if you want to avoid external dependencies, you can use any other tool that prints a string in the format described above.