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Excerpts from Tim Schnell's message of 2013-12-05 09:49:03 -0800:
> 
> On 12/5/13 11:33 AM, "Randall Burt" <randall.burt at RACKSPACE.COM> wrote:
> 
> >On Dec 5, 2013, at 11:10 AM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Excerpts from James Slagle's message of 2013-12-05 08:35:12 -0800:
> >>> On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:
> >>>> Excerpts from Monty Taylor's message of 2013-12-04 17:54:45 -0800:
> >>>>> Why not just use glance?
> >>>>> 
> >>>> 
> >>>> I've asked that question a few times, and I think I can collate the
> >>>> responses I've received below. I think enhancing glance to do these
> >>>> things is on the table:
> >>> 
> >>> I'm actually interested in the use cases laid out by Heater from both
> >>> a template perspective and image perspective.  For the templates, as
> >>> Robert mentioned, Tuskar needs a solution for this requirement, since
> >>> it's deploying using templates.  For the images, we have the concept
> >>> of a "golden" image in TripleO and are heavily focused on image based
> >>> deployments.  Therefore, it seems to make sense that TripleO also
> >>> needs a way to version/tag known good images.
> >>> 
> >>> Given that, I think it makes sense  to do this in a way so that it's
> >>> consumable for things other than just templates.  In fact, you can
> >>> almost s/template/image/g on the Heater wiki page, and it pretty well
> >>> lays out what I'd like to see for images as well.
> >>> 
> >>>> 1. Glance is for big blobs of data not tiny templates.
> >>>> 2. Versioning of a single resource is desired.
> >>>> 3. Tagging/classifying/listing/sorting
> >>>> 4. Glance is designed to expose the uploaded blobs to nova, not users
> >>>> 
> >>>> My responses:
> >>>> 
> >>>> 1: Irrelevant. Smaller things will fit in it just fine.
> >>>> 
> >>>> 2: The swift API supports versions. We could also have git as a
> >>>> backend.
> >>> 
> >>> I would definitely like to see a git backend for versioning.  No
> >>> reason to reimplement a different solution for what already works
> >>> well.  I'm not sure we'd want to put a whole image into git though.
> >>> Perhaps just it's manifest (installed components, software versions,
> >>> etc) in json format would go into git, and that would be associated
> >>> back to the binary image via uuid.  That would even make it easy to
> >>> diff changes between versions, etc.
> >>> 
> >> 
> >> Right, git for a big 'ol image makes little sense.
> >> 
> >> I'm suggesting that one might want to have two glances, one for images
> >> which just uses swift versions and would just expose a list of versions,
> >> and one for templates which would use git and thus expose more features
> >> like a git remote for the repo. I'm not sure if glance has embraced the
> >> extension paradigm yet, but this would fall nicely into it.
> >
> >Alternatively, Glance could have configurable backends for each image
> >type allowing for optimization without the (often times messy) extension
> >mechanism? This is assuming it doesn't do this already - I really need to
> >start digging here. In the spirit of general OpenStack architectural
> >paradigms, as long as the service exposes a consistent interface for
> >templates that includes versioning support, the back-end store and
> >(possibly) the versioning "engine" should certainly be configurable.
> >Swift probably makes a decent first/default implementation.
> 
> I'm not sure why we are attempting to fit a round peg in a square hole
> here. Glance's entire design is built around serving images and there
> absolutely is a difference between serving BLOBs versus relatively small
> templates. Just look at the existing implementations, Heat already stores
> the template directly in the database while Glance stores the blob in an
> external file system.
> 

What aspects of circles and squares do you find match glance and the
Heater problem space? :-P

If this were as simple as geometric shape matching, my 4-year old could
do it, right? :) Let's use analogies, I _love_ analogies, but perhaps
lets be more careful about whether they actually aid the discussion.

The blobs in the heat database are going to be a problem actually. I've
dealt with a very similar relatively large system, storing millions
of resumes in a single table for a job candidate database. It performs
horribly even if you shard. These weren't 50MB resumes, these were 30 -
50 kB resumes. That is because every time you need to pull all the rows
you have to pull giant amounts of data and generally just blow out all
of the caches, buffers, etc. Keystone's token table for the sql token
backend has the same problem. RDBMS's are good at storing and retrieving
rows of relatively predictably sized data. They suck for documents.

Heat would do well to just store template references and fetch them in
the rare cases where the raw templates are needed (updates, user asks to
see it, etc). That could so easily be a glance reference.  And if Glance
was suddenly much smarter and more capable of listing/searching/etc. the
things in its database, then Heat gets a win, and so does Nova.

> I'm not opposed to having Glance as an optional configurable backend for
> Heater but if you look at the existing database models for Glance, an
> entirely separate schema would have to be created to support templates. I
> also think that having Heater as a layer above Glance or whatever other
> backend would allow for the flexibility for Heater's requirements to
> diverge in the future from requirements that might make sense for images
> but not templates.
> 

Huh? How are templates any different from images? Stick the template
in as the blob that is currently the image (note that there are
relatively small images too, like aki's for kernels which are just a
few MB). Add in some meta-data for finding/listing/displaying template
data efficiently. Bada-boom-bada-bing, you're done, right?

I would love to hear about "future requirements" for Heater that won't
fit into Glance. But thus far, I am struggling to see where this could
go that wouldn't be a place Glance also wants to go.