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That's unfortunately too simple. You run into one of two cases:

1. If the job automatically removes the protected attribute when an image
is no longer in use, then you lose the ability to use "protected" on images
that are not in use. I.e., there's no way to say, "nothing is currently
using this image, but please keep it around." (This seems particularly
useful for snapshots, for instance.)

2. If the job does not automatically remove the protected attribute, then
an image would be protected if it had ever been in use; to delete an image,
you'd have to manually un-protect it, which is a workflow that quite
explicitly defeats the whole purpose of flagging images as protected when
they're in use.

It seems like flagging an image as *not* in use is actually a fairly
difficult problem, since it requires consensus among all components that
might be using images.

The only solution that readily occurs to me would be to add something like
a filesystem link count to images in Glance. Then when Nova spawns an
instance, it increments the usage count; when the instance is destroyed,
the usage count is decremented. And similarly with other components that
use images. An image could only be deleted when its usage count was zero.

There are ample opportunities to get out of sync there, but it's at least a
sketch of something that might work, and isn't *too* horribly hackish.
Thoughts?

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A simple solution that wouldn’t require modification of glance would be a
> cron job
> that lists images and snapshots and marks them protected while they are in
> use.
>
> Vish
>
> On Dec 16, 2014, at 3:19 PM, Collins, Sean <
> Sean_Collins2 at cable.comcast.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 05:12:31PM EST, Chris St. Pierre wrote:
> >> No, I'm looking to prevent images that are in use from being deleted.
> "In
> >> use" and "protected" are disjoint sets.
> >
> > I have seen multiple cases of images (and snapshots) being deleted while
> > still in use in Nova, which leads to some very, shall we say,
> > interesting bugs and support problems.
> >
> > I do think that we should try and determine a way forward on this, they
> > are indeed disjoint sets. Setting an image as protected is a proactive
> > measure, we should try and figure out a way to keep tenants from
> > shooting themselves in the foot if possible.
> >
> > --
> > Sean M. Collins
> > _______________________________________________
> > OpenStack-dev mailing list
> > OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Chris St. Pierre
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