[openstack-dev] [Horizon] dependency on non-standardized, private APIs

Matthew Farina matt at mattfarina.com
Tue Mar 3 15:41:27 UTC 2015


Radoslaw,

Unfortunately the documentation for OpenStack has some holes. What you are
calling a private API may be something missed in the documentation. Is
there a documentation bug on the issue? If not one should be created.

In practice OpenStack isn't a specification and implementation. The
documentation has enough missing information you can't treat it this way.
If you want to contribute to improving the documentation I'm sure the
documentation team would appreciate it. The last time I looked there were a
number of undocumented public swift API details.

Best of luck,
Matt Farina

On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Radoslaw Zarzynski <rzarzynski at mirantis.com>
wrote:

> Guys,
>
> I would like discuss a problem which can be seen in Horizon: breaking
> the boundaries of public, well-specified Object Storage API in favour
> of utilizing a Swift-specific extensions. Ticket #1297173 [1] may serve
> as a good example of such violation. It is about relying on
> non-standard (in the terms of OpenStack Object Storage API v1) and
> undocumented HTTP header provided by Swift. In order to make
> Ceph RADOS Gateway work correctly with Horizon, developers had to
> inspect sources of Swift and implement the same behaviour.
>
> From my perspective, that practise breaks the the mission of OpenStack
> which is much more than delivering yet another IaaS/PaaS implementation.
> I think its main goal is to provide a universal set of APIs covering all
> functional areas relevant for cloud computing, and to place that set
> of APIs in front as many implementations as possible. Having an open
> source reference implementation of a particular API is required to prove
> its viability, but is secondary to having an open and documented API.
>
> I have full understanding that situations where the public OpenStack
> interfaces are insufficient to get the work done might exist.
> However, introduction of dependency on implementation-specific feature
> (especially without giving the users a choice via e.g. some
> configuration option) is not the proper way to deal with the problem.
> From my point of view, such cases should be handled with adoption of
> new, carefully designed and documented version of the given API.
>
> In any case I think that Horizon, at least basic functionality, should
> work with any storage which provides Object Storage API.
> That being said, I'm willing to contribute such patches, if we decide
> to go that way.
>
> Best regards,
> Radoslaw Zarzynski
>
> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1297173
>
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