Open Stack

Hey all,

I realize now from the title of the other TripleO/Mistral thread [1] that
the discussion there may have gotten confused.  I think using Mistral for
TripleO processes that are obviously workflows - stack deployment, node
registration - makes perfect sense.  That thread is exploring practicalities
for doing that, and I think that's great work.

What I inappropriately started to address in that thread was a somewhat
orthogonal point that Dan asked in his original email, namely:

"what it might look like if we were to use Mistral as a replacement for the
TripleO API entirely"

I'd like to create this thread to talk about that; more of a 'should we'
than 'can we'.  And to do that, I want to indulge in a thought exercise
stemming from an IRC discussion with Dan and others.  All, please correct me
if I've misstated anything.

The IRC discussion revolved around one use case: deploying a Heat stack
directly from a Swift container.  With an updated patch, the Heat CLI can
support this functionality natively.  Then we don't need a TripleO API; we
can use Mistral to access that functionality, and we're done, with no need
for additional code within TripleO.  And, as I understand it, that's the
true motivation for using Mistral instead of a TripleO API: avoiding custom
code within TripleO.

That's definitely a worthy goal... except from my perspective, the story
doesn't quite end there.  A GUI needs additional functionality, which boils
down to: understanding the Heat deployment templates in order to provide
options for a user; and persisting those options within a Heat environment
file.

Right away I think we hit a problem.  Where does the code for 'understanding
options' go?  Much of that understanding comes from the capabilities map
in tripleo-heat-templates [2]; it would make sense to me that responsibility
for that would fall to a TripleO library.

Still, perhaps we can limit the amount of TripleO code.  So to give API
access to 'getDeploymentOptions', we can create a Mistral workflow.

  Retrieve Heat templates from Swift -> Parse capabilities map

Which is fine-ish, except from an architectural perspective
'getDeploymentOptions' violates the abstraction layer between storage and
business logic, a problem that is compounded because 'getDeploymentOptions'
is not the only functionality that accesses the Heat templates and needs
exposure through an API.  And, as has been discussed on a separate TripleO
thread, we're not even sure Swift is sufficient for our needs; one possible
consideration right now is allowing deployment from templates stored in
multiple places, such as the file system or git.

Are we going to have duplicate 'getDeploymentOptions' workflows for each
storage mechanism?  If we consolidate the storage code within a TripleO
library, do we really need a *workflow* to call a single function?  Is a
thin TripleO API that contains no additional business logic really so bad
at that point?

My gut reaction is to say that proposing Mistral in place of a TripleO API
is to look at the engineering concerns from the wrong direction.  The
Mistral alternative comes from a desire to limit custom TripleO code at all
costs.  I think that is an extremely dangerous attitude that leads to
compromises and workarounds that will quickly lead to a shaky code base
full of design flaws that make it difficult to implement or extend any
functionality cleanly.

I think the correct attitude is to simply look at the problem we're
trying to solve and find the correct architecture.  For these get/set
methods that the API needs, it's pretty simple: storage -> some logic ->
a REST API.  Adding a workflow engine on top of that is unneeded, and I
believe that means it's an incorrect solution.


Thanks,
Tzu-Mainn Chen



[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-January/083757.html
[2] https://github.com/openstack/tripleo-heat-templates/blob/master/capabilities_map.yaml