Blog.

3Crowd’s product and engineering team are delighted to introduce this new feature to our customers: Rule Sets inheritance.

In our constant effort to streamline the CrowdDirector™ load balancer as a service, we have identified a feature which will be a great use to many of our customers who deal with a lot of Rule Sets.
We found that very often, our customers used the exact same Rule Sets with different CNAMES (HTTP_302 redirects) or NS Delegations (DNS redirects), resulting in maintaining multiple objects that basically use the exact same routing behavior, and creating new blank Rule Sets to then manually duplicate existing ones.

These times are now over: it is now possible to create a new Rule Set based on an existing one. We call this Rule Set Inheritance.

With this new release of the CrowdDirector™ you can choose, during the creation steps, to base your new Rule Set on an existing one, cloning the rules from that already existing rule. The benefit is that a logical link now binds an inherited Rule Set to its ‘parent’ rule.
The are multiple valuable advantages to this:

• Creation of such rules just got easier since the only parameter to input is the CNAME or NS Name.
• All rules within an inherited Rule Set are duplicated from the Parent Rule. So editing that Parent Rule Set will now update all the inherited ‘child’ Rule Sets instantly.
• You do not need to modify the inherited Rule Set anymore – any modification on a Parent Rule Set automatically adjusts all the Rule Sets which inherit from it with the exact same modifications.
• At a rule set level, you can also detach a rule and break its inheritance link, meaning that when doing so, it will now be made independent and edit-able.
• You can also attach an already existing Rule Set to another one. In this case, its own rules will be replaced with the rules of its new Parent, and the inheritance link binds it in the same way that all modifications to it will be deferred to its parent.

Here are a few tricks based on this new feature that we think might be of interest to you, based on using this feature:

• Minor variations on a Rule Set
  If you ever want to create new Rule Sets that only differ by a few clauses, just clone them from an existing one, detach them, and only modify the part that should differ from the initial one.
• Add Network Resources to deliver from on a broad range of Rule Sets
  Very often, you will need to add more and more Network Resources in the PRIMARY ACTION part of a Rule Set, as your traffic on these hosts increases with time. If many Rule Sets use the same hosts, this means that you need to modify all PRIMARY ACTION statements in all the concerned Rule Sets.
  With this new feature, if all are bound to the same Rule Set with an inheritance link, all you need to do is update the Parent’s PRIMARY ACTION statement, and it will apply downwards to all its inherited Rule Sets.

Here are some elements of the new UI that was designed for this feature