Open Stack

We spent most of the Nova API meeting today to try to get to a concensus
space on https://review.openstack.org/#/c/393205/ which is about
validating the parameters passed for sorting / filtering on the servers
resource. Today, we pretty much take whatever you throw in there and jam
it in the sql filters so we're bleeding out internal details, and
letting you do weird things like sort on join tables which causes
potential major performance issues.

The solution is be explicit about the filters that we support. The
challenge is going from weird grey space where none of this is well
defined, to a well defined space.

We all AGREED that we need to be explicit about what's supported, the
current state of the world is madness.

We still need final agreement on what that whitelist is. John and Alex
are going to validate that over the next day or so. The intent is to
keep this pretty wide to anything sensible in the REST representation
that's not going to kill us on the join tables side.

One of the sticking points on the spec was the idea that everything in
the filter/sort whitelist needed performant indexes. This was going to
make the whitelist smaller, then got push back from ops that really want
some of those other things.

We all AGREED to *drop* that requirement on indexing everything. With
Cells v2 coming, searchlight going to be needed for efficient full cloud
searching of instances, the entire performance profile of a lot of these
are going to change over the next couple of cycles. Instead of focusing
on tightening those up now, we should just include documentation on how
to performance tune your db if your users are regularly using filters we
don't optimize for.

This REMOVES the need for the policy point which was going to allow
these things, as we'll keep the whitelist large. It means every cloud
has the same behavior.

Lastly, there was the question of admin vs. non admin allowed parameters.

We AGREED that the only things we'd make admin only are things that leak
cloud internals, which is node/host attributes. In an ideal future we'd
like non admin users to be able to operate on the hashed versions of
these (currently a sha(project_id + host)), however that's all done
python side now for display, so it's not really an option today.

This would make things like `project_id` and `all_tenants` valid filters
for regular users. However, if we interpret them within the user's
context, that's fine. `all_tenants` means "All tenants that I am allowed
to see". For a Nova admin, that's everyone. In a future with
hierarchical multi tenancy, this might be a subtree. project_id is fine
as long as it's filtered by the project_id's you have access to in your
context. Mostly it will be a noop for normal users, but there is no
reason not to allow it. Plus it does create a soft roll into
hierarchical multi tenancy.


We also AGREED that we really need to get the spec into a merge state by
Friday, and that folks would start working on code under the assumption
that the agreement above is where we are headed. The only really
remaining sticking point is the exact content of the whitelist, which
John and Alex are going to focus on. Then clean up language in the spec.

For folks not in this meeting, please make sure we didn't miss anything
here. Hopefully we can get this closed shortly.

Thanks a bunch,

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net