Open Stack

Hi all,

Looking to start a wider discussion, prompted by:
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/54651/
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/heat/+spec/management-api
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/heat-management-api

Summary - it has been proposed to add a management API to Heat, similar in
concept to the admin/public API topology used in keystone.

I'm concerned that this may not be a pattern we want to propagate throughout
OpenStack, and that for most services, we should have one API to access data,
with the scope of the data returned/accessible defined by the roles held by
the user (ie making proper use of the RBAC facilities afforded to us via
keystone).

In the current PoC patch, a users admin-ness is derived from the fact that
they are accessing a specific endpoint, and that policy did not deny them
access to that endpoint.  I think this is wrong, and we should use keystone
roles to decide the scope of the request.

The proposal seems to consider tenants as the top-level of abstraction, with
the next level up being a global service provider admin, but this does not
consider the keystone v3 concept of domains [1], or that you may wish to
provide some of these admin-ish features to domain-admin users (who will
adminster data accross multiple tenants, just like has been proposed), via the
public-facing API.

It seems like we need a way of scoping the request (via data in the context),
based on a heirarchy of admin-ness, like:

1. Normal user
2. Tenant Admin (has admin role in a tenant)
3. Domain Admin (has admin role in all tenants in the domain)
4. Service Admin (has admin role everywhere, like admin_token for keystone)

The current "is_admin" flag which is being used in the PoC patch won't allow
this granularity of administrative boundaries to be represented, and splitting
admin actions into a separate API will prevent us providing tenant and domain
level admin functionality to customers in a public cloud environment.

It has been mentioned that in keystone, if you have admin in one tenant, you
are admin everywhere, which is a pattern I think we should not follow -
keystone folks, what are your thoughts in terms of roadmap to make role
assignment (at the request level) scoped to tenants rather than globally
applied?  E.g what data can we add to move from X-Roles in auth_token, to
expressing roles in multiple tenants and domains?

Basically, I'm very concerned that we discuss this, get a clear roadmap which
will work with future keystone admin/role models, and is not a short-term hack
which we won't want to maintain long-term.

What are peoples thoughts on this?

[1]: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Domains