[openstack-dev] [climate] Mirantis proposal to extend Climate to support virtual resources reservation

Scott Devoid devoid at anl.gov
Tue Aug 6 16:58:45 UTC 2013


Some thoughts:

0. Should Climate also address the need for an eviction service? That is, a
service that can weight incoming requests and existing resource allocations
using some set of policies and evict an existing resource allocations to
make room for the higher weighted request. Eviction is necessary if you
want to implement a Spot-like service. And if you want Climate reservations
that do not tie physical resources to the reservation, this is also
required to ensure that requests against the reservation succeed. (Note
that even if you do tie physical resources as in whole-host reservations,
an eviction service can help when physical resources fail.)

1. +1 Let end users continue to use existing APIs for resources and extend
those interfaces with reservation attributes. Climate should only handle
reservation crud and tracking.

2a. As an operator, I want the power to define reservations in terms of
host capacity / flavor, min duration, max duration... and limit what kind
of reservation requests can come in. Basically define "reservation flavors"
and let users submit requests as instances of one "reservation flavor". If
you let the end user define all of these parameters I will be rejecting a
lot of reservation requests.

2b. What's the point of an "immediate lease"? This should be equivalent to
making the request against Nova directly right? Perhaps there's a rational
for this w.r.t. billing? Otherwise I'm not sure what utility this kind of
reservation provides?

2c. Automatic vs. manual reservation approval:

What a user wants to know is whether a reservation can be granted in a
> all-or-nothing manner at the time he is asking the lease.


This is a very hard problem to solve: you have to model resource
availability (MTTF, MTBF), resource demand (how full are we going to be),
and bake in explicit policies (this tenant gets priority) to automatically
grant / deny such reservations. Having reservations go through a manual
request -> operator approval system is extremely simple and allows
operators to tackle the automated case as they need to.

All I need is a tool that lets a tenant spawn a single critical instance
even when another tenant is running an application that's constantly trying
to grab as many instances as it can get.

3. This will add a lot of complexity, particularly if you want to tackle #0.

5. (NEW) Note that Amazon's reserved instances feature doesn't tie
reservations against specific instances. Effectively you purchase discount
coupons to be applied at the end of the billing cycle. I am not sure how
Amazon handles tenants with multiple reservations at different utilization
levels (prioritize heavy -> light?).

~ Scott


On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Patrick Petit <patrick.petit at bull.net>wrote:

>  Hi Dina and All,
> Please see comments inline. We can  drill down on the specifics off-line
> if that's more practical.
> Thanks in advance,
> Patrick
>
> On 8/5/13 3:19 PM, Dina Belova wrote:
>
>  Hello, everyone!
>
>
>  Patrick, Julien, thank you so much for your comments. As for the moments
> Patrick mentioned in his letter, I'll describe our vision for them below.
>
>
>  1) Patrick, thank you for the idea! I think it would be great to add not
> only 'post-lease actions policy', but also 'start-lease actions policy'. I
> mean like having two types of what can be done with resource (virtual one)
> on lease starting - 'start VM automatically' or 'start VM manually'. This
> means user may not use reserved resources at all, if he needs such a
> behaviour.
>
> Something along those lines would work but I think the 'start VM manually'
> keeps over specifying the behavior IMO since you still make the assumption
> that reserved resources are always started using a term 'manually' that is
> misleading because if not automatically started by the reservation service
> they can still be automatically started elsewhere like in Heat. I general I
> agree that users can take advantage of being able to specify pre and post
> lease actions / conditions although it shouldn't be prescriptive of
> something binary like start automatically or manually. Another beneficial
> usage could be to send parametrized notifications. I would also make the
> pre and post action optional so that if the user choose not to associate an
> action with the realization of a lease, he doesn't have to specify
> anything. Finally, I would also  that the specification of a pre and post
> action is assorted of a time offset to take into account the lead time to
> provision certain types of resources like physical hosts. That's a possible
> solution to point 4.
>
>
>  2) We really believe that creating lease first, and going with its id to
> all the OpenStack projects to use is a better idea than 'filling' the lease
> with resources just at the moment of its creation. I'll try to explain why.
> First of all, as for virtual reservations, we'll need to proxy Nova,
> Cinder, etc. APIs through Reservation API to reserve VM or volume or
> something else. Workflow for VM/volume/etc. creation is really complicated
> and only services written to do this have to do it, in our opinion. Second,
> this makes adding new reservations to the created lease simple and user
> friendly. And the last moment, we should not copy all these dashboard pages
> for instance/volume/... creation to the reservation Dashboard tab in this
> case. As for the physical reservations, as you mentioned, there is no way
> to 'create' them like virtual resources in the Nova's, for example, API
> now. That's why there are two ways to solve this problem and reserve them.
> First way is to reserve them from Reservation Service as it is implemented
> now and described also in our document (WF-2b part of it). The second
> variant (that seems to be more elegant, but more complicated as well) is to
> implement needed parts as Nova API extension to let Nova do the things it
> does the best way - managing hosts, VMs, etc. Our concern in this question
> is not doing things Nova (or any other service) can do much better.
>
> Well, I am under the impression that you put forward an argumentation that
> is mostly based on an implementation artifact which takes advantage of the
> actual resource provisioning workflow and dashboard rather than taking into
> account the most common use cases and practices. There maybe use cases that
> mandate for an iterative  workflow that is similar to what you describe. I
> may be wrong, but I am doubtful it is going to be a common use case. We
> tend to think of AWS as being a reference and you've probably noticed that
> reservations in AWS are performed by chunk (the more I reserve for the
> longer period of time, the cheaper). The problem with adding reservations
> into a lease on a continuous basis is that as a user I may end up undo what
> I have done (e.g. I got only 900 out of the 1000 VMs I want) and keep
> trying forever. That's potentially a lot of overhead. Also, as a cloud
> operator, I'd like to know what my reservation pipeline looks like ahead of
> time so that I can provision new hardware in due time. That's capacity
> planning. As an operator, I also want to be able grant reservations and
> charge for it even if I don't have the capacity right now provided the lead
> time to provisioning new hardware doesn't conflict with the terms of the
> pending leases. If a user can add reservations to a lease at the last
> moment, that flexibility may be compromised. In any events, this is how we
> envision the behavior of the reservation service for the reservation of
> physical capacity and so, it is important the service API can support that
> interaction model. I think it's probably okay to do it in two separate
> steps 1) create the lease, 2) add reservation (although it seems
> problematic in the case of immediate lease) but the actual hosts
> reservation request should include a cardinality factor so that if the user
> wants to reserve x number of hosts in one chunk he can do it. The
> reservation service would respond yes or no depending on the three possible
> lease terms (immediate, best effort and schedule) along with the operator's
> specific reservation policies that yet has to be configurable one way or
> another. To be discussed...
>
>
>  3) We completely agree with you! Our 'nested reservation' vision was
> created only to let user the opportunity of checking reservation status of
> complex virtual resources (stacks) by having an opportunity to check status
> of all its 'nested' components, like VMs, networks, etc. This can be done
> as well by using just Heat without reservation service. Now we are thinking
> about reservation as the reservation of the OpenStack resource that has ID
> in the OpenStack service DB, no matter how complex it is (VM, network,
> floating IP, stack, etc.)
>
> I am not sure I am getting this...? All I wanted to say is that
> orchestration is a pretty big deal and my recommendation is not to do any
> of this at all in the reservation service but rely on Heat instead when
> possible. I understand you seem to agree with this... Also, I am not sure
> how you can do stack reservations on the basis of a Heat template when it
> has auto-scaling groups.
>
>
>  4) We were thinking about Reservation Scheduler as a service that
> controls lease life cycle (starting, ending, making user notifications,
> etc.) and communicates with Reservation Manager via RPC. Reservation
> Manager can send user notifications about close lease ending using
> Ceilometer (this question has to be researched). As for the time needed to
> run physical reservation or complex virtual one, that is used to make
> preparations and settings, I think it would be better for user to amortise
> it in lease using period, because for physical resources it much depends on
> hardware resources and for virtual ones - on hardware, network and geo
> location of DCs.
>
> Do you mean make the user aware of the provisioning lead time in the lease
> schedule? How do suggest they know how to account for that? In practice, a
> lease is a contract and so the reservations must be available at the exact
> time the lease becomes effective.
>
>
>  Thank you,
>
> DIna.
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Julien Danjou <julien at danjou.info> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 02 2013, Patrick Petit wrote:
>>
>> > 3. The proposal specifies that a lease can contain a combo of different
>> >    resources types reservations (instances, volumes, hosts, Heat
>> >    stacks, ...) that can even be nested and that the reservation
>> >    service will somehow orchestrate their deployment when the lease
>> >    kicks in. In my opinion, many use cases (at least ours) do not
>> >    warrant for that level of complexity and so, if that's something
>> >    that is need to support your use cases, then it should be delivered
>> >    as module that can be loaded optionally in the system. Our preferred
>> >    approach is to use Heat for deployment orchestration.
>>
>>  I agree that this is not something Climate should be in charge. If the
>> user wants to reserve a set of services and deploys them automatically,
>> Climate should provide the lease and Heat the deployment orchestration.
>> Also, for example, it may be good to be able to reserve automatically
>> the right amount of resources needed to deploy a Heat stack via Climate.
>>
>> --
>> Julien Danjou
>> // Free Software hacker / freelance consultant
>> // http://julien.danjou.info
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> OpenStack-dev mailing list
>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>>
>>
>
>
>  --
>
> Best regards,
>
> Dina Belova
>
> Software Engineer
>
> Mirantis Inc.
>
>
>
> --
> Patrick Petit
> Cloud Computing Principal Architect, Innovative Products
> Bull, Architect of an Open World TM
> Tél : +33 (0)4 76 29 70 31
> Mobile : +33 (0)6 85 22 06 39http://www.bull.com
>
>
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>
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