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On 25/01/2015 11:00 PM, Ian Wells wrote:
> Lots of open questions in here, because I think we need a long conversation
> on the subject.
>
> On 23 January 2015 at 15:51, Kevin Benton <blak111 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It seems like a change to using internal RPC interfaces would be pretty
>> unstable at this point.
>>
>> Can we start by identifying the shortcomings of the HTTP interface and see
>> if we can address them before making the jump to using an interface which
>> has been internal to Neutron so far?
>>
>
> I think the protocol being used is a distraction from the actual
> shortcomings.
>
> Firstly, you'd have to explain to me why HTTP is so much slower than RPC.
> If HTTP is incredibly slow, can be be sped up?  If RPC is moving the data
> around using the same calls, what changes?  Secondly, the problem seems
> more that we make too many roundtrips - which would be the same over RPC -
> and if that's true, perhaps we should be doing bulk operations - which is
> not transport-specific.

I agree. If the problem is too many round trips our the interaction 
being too chatty, I would expect moving towards more service oriented 
APIs - where HTTP tends to be appropriate. I think we should focus on 
better separation of concerns, and approaches such as bulk operations 
using notifications where cross process synchronization for a task is 
required. Exploring transport alternatives seems premature until after 
we are satisfied that our house is in order architecture-wise.

Furthermore, I have some "off-the-cuff" concerns over claims that HTTP 
is slower than RPC in our case. I'm actually used to arguing that RPC is 
faster than HTTP but based on how our RPCs work, I find such an argument 
counter-intuitive. Our REST API calls are direct client->server requests 
with GET's returning results immediately. Our RPC calls involve AMQP and 
a messaging queue server, with requests and replies encapsulated in 
separate messages. If no reply is required, then the RPC *might* be 
dispatched more quickly from the client side as it is simply a message 
being queued. The actual servicing of the request (server side dispatch 
or "upcall" in broker-parlance) happens "some time later", meaning 
possibly never. If the RPC has a return value, then the client must wait 
for the return reply message, which again involves an AMQP message being 
constructed, published and queued, then finally consumed. At the very 
least, this implies latency for dependent on the relative location and 
availability of the queue server.

As an aside (meaning you might want to skip this part), one way our RPC 
mechanism might be "better" than REST over HTTP calls is in the cost of 
constructing and encoding of requests and replies. However, this is more 
of a function of how requests are encoded and less how the are sent. 
Changing how request payloads are constructed would close that gap. 
Again reducing the number of requests required to "do something"  would 
reduce the significance of any differences here. Unless the difference 
between the two methods were enormous (like double or an order of 
magnitude) then reducing the number of calls to perform a task still has 
more gain than switching methods. Another difference might be in how 
well the "transport" implementation scales. I would consider disastrous 
scaling characteristics a pretty compelling argument.

> I absolutely do agree that Neutron should be doing more of the work, and
> Nova less, when it comes to port binding.  (And, in fact, I'd like that we
> stopped considering it 'Nova-Neutron' port binding, since in theory another
> service attaching stuff to the network could request a port be bound; it
> just happens at the moment that it's always Nova.)
>
> One other problem, not yet raised,  is that Nova doesn't express its needs
> when it asks for a port to be bound, and this is actually becoming a
> problem for me right now.  At the moment, Neutron knows, almost
> psychically, what binding type Nova will accept, and hands it over; Nova
> then deals with whatever binding type it receives (optimisitically
> expecting it's one it will support, and getting shirty if it isn't).  The
> problem I'm seeing at the moment, and other people have mentioned, is that
> certain forwarders can only bind a vhostuser port to a VM if the VM itself
> has hugepages enabled.  They could fall back to another binding type but at
> the moment that isn't an option: Nova doesn't tell Neutron anything about
> what it supports, so there's no data on which to choose.  It should be
> saying 'I will take these binding types in this preference order'.  I
> think, in fact, that asking Neutron for bindings of a certain preference
> type order, would give us much more flexibility - like, for instance, not
> having to know exactly which binding type to deliver to which compute node
> in multi-hypervisor environments, where at the moment the choice is made in
> Neutron.
>
> I scanned through the etherpad and I really like Salvatore's idea of adding
>> a service plugin to Neutron that is designed specifically for interacting
>> with Nova. All of the Nova notification interactions can be handled there
>> and we can add new API components designed for Nova's use (e.g. syncing
>> data, etc). Does anyone have any objections to that approach?
>>
>
> I think we should be leaning the other way, actually - working out what a
> generic service - think a container management service, or an edge network
> service - would want to ask when it wanted to connect to a virtual network,
> and making an Neutron interface that supports that properly *without* being
> tailored to Nova.  The requirements are similar in all cases, so it's not
> clear that a generic interface would be any more complex.
>
> Notifications on data changes in Neutron to prevent orphaning is another
> example of a repeating pattern.  It's probably the same for any service
> that binds to Neutron, but right now Neutron has Nova-specific code in it.
> Broadening the scope, it's also likely the same in Cinder, and in fact it's
> also pretty similar to the problem you get when you delete a project in
> Keystone and all your resources get orphaned.  Is a Nova-Neutron specific
> solution the right thing to do?

I have reservations. It all depends on what it is going to do. Referring 
to it as nova-centric might also be a distraction. As part of scoping 
out the work for refactoring the nova.network.neutronv2.API code (you 
all know about that, right?), I discussed refactoring the neutronclient 
to make it more usable as client library with several people. This 
refactoring would prioritize nova's requirements when making changes, 
but the changes would still be generally usable. Instead of approaching 
this directly, I decided to start by wrapping the client in nova - 
working around shortcomings and rationalizing the API somewhat. I always 
saw this eventually being pushed out of nova into an independent client 
library and in cases where the neutron API itself is being "worked 
around", relevant changes made in the neutron API itself. In that sense 
it is not unlike what Salvatore proposes but the approach is different 
and ultimately not nova-specific at all.

Cheers,

Brent Eagles