Open Stack

On 09/04/2014 01:30 AM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> Excerpts from Flavio Percoco's message of 2014-09-04 00:08:47 -0700:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Last Tuesday the TC held the first graduation review for Zaqar. During
>> the meeting some concerns arose. I've listed those concerns below with
>> some comments hoping that it will help starting a discussion before the
>> next meeting. In addition, I've added some comments about the project
>> stability at the bottom and an etherpad link pointing to a list of use
>> cases for Zaqar.
>>
>
> Hi Flavio. This was an interesting read. As somebody whose attention has
> recently been drawn to Zaqar, I am quite interested in seeing it
> graduate.
>
>> # Concerns
>>
>> - Concern on operational burden of requiring NoSQL deploy expertise to
>> the mix of openstack operational skills
>>
>> For those of you not familiar with Zaqar, it currently supports 2 nosql
>> drivers - MongoDB and Redis - and those are the only 2 drivers it
>> supports for now. This will require operators willing to use Zaqar to
>> maintain a new (?) NoSQL technology in their system. Before expressing
>> our thoughts on this matter, let me say that:
>>
>>      1. By removing the SQLAlchemy driver, we basically removed the chance
>> for operators to use an already deployed "OpenStack-technology"
>>      2. Zaqar won't be backed by any AMQP based messaging technology for
>> now. Here's[0] a summary of the research the team (mostly done by
>> Victoria) did during Juno
>>      3. We (OpenStack) used to require Redis for the zmq matchmaker
>>      4. We (OpenStack) also use memcached for caching and as the oslo
>> caching lib becomes available - or a wrapper on top of dogpile.cache -
>> Redis may be used in place of memcached in more and more deployments.
>>      5. Ceilometer's recommended storage driver is still MongoDB, although
>> Ceilometer has now support for sqlalchemy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong).
>>
>> That being said, it's obvious we already, to some extent, promote some
>> NoSQL technologies. However, for the sake of the discussion, lets assume
>> we don't.
>>
>> I truly believe, with my OpenStack (not Zaqar's) hat on, that we can't
>> keep avoiding these technologies. NoSQL technologies have been around
>> for years and we should be prepared - including OpenStack operators - to
>> support these technologies. Not every tool is good for all tasks - one
>> of the reasons we removed the sqlalchemy driver in the first place -
>> therefore it's impossible to keep an homogeneous environment for all
>> services.
>>
>
> I whole heartedly agree that non traditional storage technologies that
> are becoming mainstream are good candidates for use cases where SQL
> based storage gets in the way. I wish there wasn't so much FUD
> (warranted or not) about MongoDB, but that is the reality we live in.
>
>> With this, I'm not suggesting to ignore the risks and the extra burden
>> this adds but, instead of attempting to avoid it completely by not
>> evolving the stack of services we provide, we should probably work on
>> defining a reasonable subset of NoSQL services we are OK with
>> supporting. This will help making the burden smaller and it'll give
>> operators the option to choose.
>>
>> [0] http://blog.flaper87.com/post/marconi-amqp-see-you-later/
>>
>>
>> - Concern on should we really reinvent a queue system rather than
>> piggyback on one
>>
>> As mentioned in the meeting on Tuesday, Zaqar is not reinventing message
>> brokers. Zaqar provides a service akin to SQS from AWS with an OpenStack
>> flavor on top. [0]
>>
>
> I think Zaqar is more like SMTP and IMAP than AMQP. You're not really
> trying to connect two processes in real time. You're trying to do fully
> asynchronous messaging with fully randomized access to any message.
>
> Perhaps somebody should explore whether the approaches taken by large
> scale IMAP providers could be applied to Zaqar.
>
> Anyway, I can't imagine writing a system to intentionally use the
> semantics of IMAP and SMTP. I'd be very interested in seeing actual use
> cases for it, apologies if those have been posted before.

It seems like you're EITHER describing something called XMPP that has at 
least one open source scalable backend called ejabberd. OR, you've 
actually hit the nail on the head with bringing up SMTP and IMAP but for 
some reason that feels strange.

SMTP and IMAP already implement every feature you've described, as well 
as retries/failover/HA and a fully end to end secure transport (if 
installed properly) If you don't actually set them up to run as a public 
messaging interface but just as a cloud-local exchange, then you could 
get by with very low overhead for a massive throughput - it can very 
easily be run on a single machine for Sean's simplicity, and could just 
as easily be scaled out using well known techniques for public cloud 
sized deployments?

So why not use existing daemons that do this? You could still use the 
REST API you've got, but instead of writing it to a mongo backend and 
trying to implement all of the things that already exist in SMTP/IMAP - 
you could just have them front to it. You could even bypass normal 
delivery mechanisms and do neat things with local injection.

I don't care about the NoSQL question on its own. Mongo is fine. Redis 
is fine. I don't think either has any features for this use case that 
make a licks worth of difference compared to MySQL or Postgres, but I 
also don't think they are a PROBLEM in an of themselves.

The main thing I care about here is every description I've heard of what 
zaqar wants to do (which does seem to be getting clearer through this 
thread) is still well implemented somewhere as an existing scalable 
service. Is zaqar actually Rabbit with a REST interface? Is it ejabberd 
with a rest interface? Or is it IMAP/SMTP with a REST interface. You'll 
note that probably nobody would think a single server that wanted to be 
both Rabbit AND IMAP/SMTP is a good idea ... at least this is one of the 
reasons why we all think Microsoft Exchange is a pile of garbage, no?

I also worry about the fact that one description of zaqar was used to 
communicate a need for divergent requirements (it needs to be a 
high-volume fast message broker/queue - which, btw, sounds more like 
Rabbit/oslo.messaging and less like what Clint describes above) ... and 
that's why it wants to use falcon and not pecan and why it wants to use 
mongo and not SQL. And then what we're doing it reimplementing something 
like rabbit except in python (again, given as the justification for 
deviating from how other bits of OpenStack work)

BUT - if that's not actually what zaqar is - if it isn't a rabbit 
replacement and doesn't need to do massive high volume sub-second 
queuing because what it's actually modeling is a message subscription 
service that's closer to email than to anything else, then there is 
nothing about the components that are happily used in the rest of 
OpenStack that should be precluded from being used. A REST api written 
in pecan should be fine ... as should an SQL backend, because 99% of all 
operations are going to be primary key lookups where even a moderately 
tuned database should be absolutely fine at keeping up.

So which is it? Because it sounds like to me it's a thing that actually 
does NOT need to diverge in technology in any way, but that I've been 
told that it needs to diverge because it's delivering a different set of 
features - and I'm pretty sure if it _is_ the thing that needs to 
diverge in technology because of its feature set, then it's a thing I 
don't think we should be implementing in python in OpenStack because it 
already exists and it's called AMQP.

>> Some things that differentiate Zaqar from SQS is it's capability for
>> supporting different protocols without sacrificing multi-tenantcy and
>> other intrinsic features it provides. Some protocols you may consider
>> for Zaqar are: STOMP, MQTT.
>>
>> As far as the backend goes, Zaqar is not re-inventing it either. It sits
>> on top of existing storage technologies that have proven to be fast and
>> reliable for this task. The choice of using NoSQL technologies has a lot
>> to do with this particular thing and the fact that Zaqar needs a storage
>> capable of scaling, replicating and good support for failover.
>>
>
> What's odd to me is that other systems like Cassandra and Riak are not
> being discussed. There are well documented large scale message storage
> systems on both, and neither is encumbered by the same licensing FUD
> as MongoDB.
>
> Anyway, again if we look at this as a place to storage and retrieve
> messages, and not as a queue, then talking about databases, instead of
> message brokers, makes a lot more sense.
>
>>
>> - concern on the maturity of the NoQSL not AGPL backend (Redis)
>>
>> Redis backend just landed and I've been working on a gate job for it
>> today. Although it hasn't been tested in production, if Zaqar graduates,
>> it still has a full development cycle to be tested and improved before
>> the first integrated release happens.
>>
>
> I'd be quite interested to see how it is expected to scale. From my very
> quick reading of the driver, it only supports a single redis server. No
> consistent hash ring or anything like that.
>
>> # Use Cases
>>
>> In addition to the aforementioned concerns and comments, I also would
>> like to share an etherpad that contains some use cases that other
>> integrated projects have for Zaqar[0]. The list is not exhaustive and
>> it'll contain more information before the next meeting.
>>
>> [0] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/zaqar-integrated-projects-use-cases
>>
>
> Just taking a look, there are two basic applications needed:
>
> 1) An inbox. Horizon wants to know when snapshots are done. Heat wants
> to know what happened during a stack action. Etc.
>
> 2) A user-focused message queue. Heat wants to push data to agents.
> Swift wants to synchronize processes when things happen.
>
> To me, #1 is Zaqar as it is today. #2 is the one that I worry may not
> be served best by bending #1 onto it.
>
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