Open Stack

On Sun, 2014-04-20 at 08:35 +0000, Huangtianhua wrote:
> Hi all: 
> 
> Currently, the EC2 API of OpenStack only has tags support (metadata)
> for instances. And there has already a blueprint about to add support
> for volumes and volume snapshots using “metadata”. 
> 
> There are a lot of resources such as
> image/subnet/securityGroup/networkInterface(port) are supported add
> tags for AWS. 
> 
> I think we should support tags for these resources. There may be no
> property “metadata" for these resources, so we should to add
> “metadata” to support the resource tags, the change related API.

Hi Tianhua,

In OpenStack, generally, the choice was made to use maps of key/value
pairs instead of lists of strings (tags) to annotate objects exposed in
the REST APIs. OpenStack REST APIs inconsistently call these maps of
key/value pairs:

 * "properties" (Glance, Cinder Image, Volume respectively)
 * "extra_specs" (Nova InstanceType)
 * "metadata" (Nova Instance, Aggregate and InstanceGroup, Neutron)
 * "metadetails" (Nova Aggregate and InstanceGroup)
 * "system_metadata" (Nova Instance -- differs from "normal" metadata in
that the key/value pairs are 'owned' by Nova, not a user...) 

Personally, I think tags are a cleaner way of annotating objects when
the annotation is coming from a normal user. Tags represent by far the
most common way for REST APIs to enable user-facing annotation of
objects in a way that is easy to search on. I'd love to see support for
tags added to any searchable/queryable object in all of the OpenStack
APIs.

I'd also like to see cleanup of the aforementioned inconsistencies in
how maps of key/value pairs are both implemented and named throughout
the OpenStack APIs. Specifically, I'd like to see this implemented in
the next major version of the Compute API:

 * Removal of the "metadetails" term
 * All key/value pairs can only be changed by users with elevated
privileged system-controlled (normal users should use tags)
 * Call all these key/value pair combinations "properties" --
technically, "metadata" is "data about data", like the size of an
integer. These key/value pairs are just data, not data about data.
 * Identify key/value pairs that are relied on by all of Nova to be a
specific key and value combination, and make these things actual real
attributes on some object model -- since that is a much greater guard
for the schema of an object and enables greater performance by allowing
both type safety of the underlying data and removes the need to search
by both a key and a value.

Best,
-jay