Open Stack

Hi all,

TL;DR: I believe that "As an infrastructure administrator, Anna wants a 
CLI for managing the deployment providing the same fundamental features 
as UI." With the planned architecture changes (making tuskar-api thinner 
and getting rid of proxying to other services), there's not an obvious 
way to achieve that. We need to figure this out. I present a few options 
and look forward for feedback.

Previously, we had planned Tuskar arcitecture like this:

tuskar-ui <-> tuskarclient <-> tuskar-api <-> heat-api|ironic-api|etc.

This meant that the "integration logic" of how to use heat, ironic and 
other services to manage an OpenStack deployment lied within 
*tuskar-api*. This gave us an easy way towards having a CLI - just build 
tuskarclient to wrap abilities of tuskar-api.


Nowadays we talk about using heat and ironic (and neutron? nova? 
ceilometer?) apis directly from the UI, similarly as Dashboard does.
But our approach cannot be exactly the same as in Dashboard's case. 
Dashboard is quite a thin wrapper on top of python-...clients, which 
means there's a natural parity between what the Dashboard and the CLIs 
can do.

We're not wrapping the APIs directly (if wrapping them directly would be 
sufficient, we could just use Dashboard and not build Tuskar API at 
all). We're building a separate UI because we need *additional logic* on 
top of the APIs. E.g. instead of directly working with Heat templates 
and Heat stacks to deploy overcloud, user will get to pick how many 
control/compute/etc. nodes he wants to have, and we'll take care of Heat 
things behind the scenes. This makes Tuskar UI significantly thicker 
than Dashboard is, and the natural parity between CLI and UI vanishes. 
By having this logic in UI, we're effectively preventing its use from 
CLI. (If i were bold i'd also think about integrating Tuskar with other 
software which would be prevented too if we keep the business logic in 
UI, but i'm not absolutely positive about use cases here).

Now this raises a question - how do we get CLI reasonably on par with 
abilities of the UI? (Or am i wrong that Anna the infrastructure 
administrator would want that?)

Here are some options i see:

1) Make a thicker python-tuskarclient and put the business logic there. 
Make it consume other python-*clients. (This is an unusual approach 
though, i'm not aware of any python-*client that would consume and 
integrate other python-*clients.)

2) Make a thicker tuskar-api and put the business logic there. (This is 
the original approach with consuming other services from tuskar-api. The 
feedback on this approach was mostly negative though.)

3) Keep tuskar-api and python-tuskarclient thin, make another library 
sitting between Tuskar UI and all python-***clients. This new project 
would contain the logic of using undercloud services to provide the 
"tuskar experience" it would expose python bindings for Tuskar UI and 
contain a CLI. (Think of it like traditional python-*client but instead 
of consuming a REST API, it would consume other python-*clients. I 
wonder if this is overengineering. We might end up with too many 
projects doing too few things? :) )

4) Keep python-tuskarclient thin, but build a separate CLI app that 
would provide same integration features as Tuskar UI does. (This would 
lead to code duplication. Depends on the actual amount of logic to 
duplicate if this is bearable or not.)


Which of the options you see as best? Did i miss some better option? Am 
i just being crazy and trying to solve a non-issue? Please tell me :)

Please don't consider the time aspect of this, focus rather on what's 
the right approach, where we want to get eventually. (We might want to 
keep a thick Tuskar UI for Icehouse not to set the hell loose, there 
will be enough refactoring already.)


Thanks

Jirka