[openstack-dev] [marconi] Reconsidering the unified API model

Flavio Percoco flavio at redhat.com
Thu Jun 12 11:56:46 UTC 2014


On 11/06/14 16:26 -0700, Devananda van der Veen wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 1:23 AM, Flavio Percoco <flavio at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> Against:
>>>
>>>  • Makes it hard for users to create applications that work across
>>> multiple
>>>    clouds, since critical functionality may or may not be available in a
>>> given
>>>    deployment. (counter: how many users need cross-cloud compatibility?
>>> Can
>>>    they degrade gracefully?)
>>
>
>The OpenStack Infra team does.
>
>> This is definitely unfortunate but I believe it's a fair trade-off. I
>> believe the same happens in other services that have support for
>> different drivers.
>
>I disagree strongly on this point.
>
>Interoperability is one of the cornerstones of OpenStack. We've had
>panels about it at summits. Designing an API which is not
>interoperable is not "a fair tradeoff" for performance - it's
>destructive to the health of the project. Where other projects have
>already done that, it's unfortunate, but let's not plan to make it
>worse.
>
>A lack of interoperability not only prevents users from migrating
>between clouds or running against multiple clouds concurrently, it
>hurts application developers who want to build on top of OpenStack
>because their applications become tied to specific *implementations*
>of OpenStack.


What I meant to say is that, based on a core set of functionalities,
all extra functionalities are part of the "fair trade-off". It's up to
the cloud provider to choose what storage driver/features they want to
expose. Nonetheless, they'll all expose the same core set of
functionalities. I believe this is true also for other services, which
I'm not trying to use as an excuse but as a reference of what the
reality of non-opinionated services is. Marconi is opinionated w.r.t
the API and the core set of functionalities it wants to support.

You make really good points that I agree with. Thanks for sharing.

-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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