Open Stack

So,
There's currently an outstanding issue with regards to a Nova shortcut command that creates a volume from an image and then boots from it in one fell swoop.  The gist of the issue is that there is currently a set timeout which can time out before the volume creation has finished (it's designed to time out in case there is an error), in cases where the image download or volume creation takes an extended period of time (e.g. under a Gluster backend for Cinder with certain network conditions).

The proposed solution is a modification to the Cinder API to provide more detail on what exactly is going on, so that we could programmatically tune the timeout.  My initial thought is to create a new column in the Volume table called 'status_detail' to provide more detailed information about the current status.  For instance, for the 'downloading' status, we could have 'status_detail' be the completion percentage or JSON containing the total size and the current amount copied.  This way, at each interval we could check to see if the amount copied had changed, and trigger the timeout if it had not, instead of blindly assuming that the operation will complete within a given amount of time.

What do people think?  Would there be a better way to do this?

Best Regards,
Solly Ross