[openstack-dev] [nova][neutron] How would nova microversion get-me-a-network in the API?

Andrew Laski andrew at lascii.com
Fri Feb 12 20:41:55 UTC 2016



On Fri, Feb 12, 2016, at 03:11 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 02/12/2016 02:19 PM, Andrew Laski wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, Feb 12, 2016, at 01:45 PM, John Garbutt wrote:
> >> On 12 February 2016 at 18:17, Andrew Laski <andrew at lascii.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, Feb 12, 2016, at 12:15 PM, Matt Riedemann wrote:
> >>>> Forgive me for thinking out loud, but I'm trying to sort out how nova
> >>>> would use a microversion in the nova API for the get-me-a-network
> >>>> feature recently added to neutron [1] and planned to be leveraged in
> >>>> nova (there isn't a spec yet for nova, I'm trying to sort this out for a
> >>>> draft).
> >>>>
> >>>> Originally I was thinking that a network is required for nova boot, so
> >>>> we'd simply check for a microversion and allow not specifying a network,
> >>>> easy peasy.
> >>>>
> >>>> Turns out you can boot an instance in nova (with neutron as the network
> >>>> backend) without a network. All you get is a measly debug log message in
> >>>> the compute logs [2]. That's kind of useless though and seems silly.
> >>>>
> >>>> I haven't tested this out yet to confirm, but I suspect that if you
> >>>> create a nova instance w/o a network, you can latter try to attach a
> >>>> network using the os-attach-interfaces API as long as you either provide
> >>>> a network ID *or* there is a public shared network or the tenant has a
> >>>> network at that point (nova looks those up if a specific network ID
> >>>> isn't provided).
> >>>>
> >>>> The high-level plan for get-me-a-network in nova was simply going to be
> >>>> if the user tries to boot an instance and doesn't provide a network, and
> >>>> there isn't a tenant network or public shared network to default to,
> >>>> then nova would call neutron's new auto-allocated-topology API to get a
> >>>> network. This, however, is a behavior change.
> >>>>
> >>>> So I guess the question now is how do we handle that behavior change in
> >>>> the nova API?
> >>>>
> >>>> We could add an auto-create-net boolean to the boot server request which
> >>>> would only be available in a microversion, then we could check that
> >>>> boolean in the compute API when we're doing network validation.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> I think a flag like this is the right approach. If it's currently valid
> >>> to boot an instance without a network than there needs to be something
> >>> to distinguish a request that wants a network created vs. a request that
> >>> doesn't want a network.
> >>>
> >>> This is still hugely useful if all that's required from a user is to
> >>> indicate that they would like a network, they still don't need to
> >>> understand/provide details of the network.
> >>
> >> I was thinking a sort of opposite. Would this work?
> >>
> >> We add a new micro-version that does this:
> >> * nothing specified: do the best we can to get a port created
> >> (get-me-a-network, etc,), or fail if not possible
> >> * --no-nics option (or similar) that says "please don't give me any nics"
> >>
> >> This means folks that don't want a network, reliably have a way to do
> >> that. For everyone else, we do the same thing when using either
> >> neutron or nova-network VLAN manager.
> > 
> > I think this pushes our microversions meaning a bit further than
> > intended. I don't think the API should flip behaviors simply based on a
> > microversion.
> > 
> > What about requiring nic information with the microversion? Make users
> > indicate explicitly if they want a network or not and avoid changing a
> > default behavior.
> 
> I think changing default behavior like that is totally within bounds,
> and was part of the original design point of microversions (and why you
> have to opt into them). So people that don't want a network that go past
> that boundary know to start saying "hands-off".
> 
> I think if the point of the experience for this API is to be working out
> of the box. So I very much like the idea of a defaults change here to
> the thing we want to be easy. And an explicit option to disable it if
> you want to do something more complicated.

I think this creates a potential for confusing behavior for users.
They're happily booting instances with no network on 2.1, as silly as
that might be, and then decide "ooh I'd like to use fancy new flag foo
which is available in 2.35". So they add the flag to their request and
set the version to 2.35 and suddenly multiple things change about their
boot process because they missed that 2.24(or whatever) changed a
default behavior. If this fits within the scope of microversions then
users will need to expect that, but it's something that would be likely
to trip me up as a user of the API.


> 
> 	-Sean
> 
> -- 
> Sean Dague
> http://dague.net
> 
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