iRODS Policy Composition: Configuration, Not Code

<!--HTML-->With a twenty-five year history, iRODS open source technology has been used to automate data management across many scientific and business domains. The scale and value of data across these domains drives the necessity for automation. This variety also demands a flexibility in data management policies over time. Organizations have satisfied their own needs by investing in the development of their own policy, but this has led to monolithic, specific policy sets tailored to a particular organization. As a community, we have observed common themes and duplication of effort across these organizations and now worked to provide generalized implementations that can be deployed across multiple domains. This new approach allows multiple policies to be configured together, or composed, without the need for custom development. For example, our Storage Tiering capability is a composition of several basic policies: Replication, Verification, Retention, and the Violating Object Discovery.