[openstack-dev] [all][tc][glance] Glance needs help, it's getting critical

Flavio Percoco flavio at redhat.com
Mon Jun 12 21:01:49 UTC 2017


On 12/06/17 23:20 +0300, Mikhail Fedosin wrote:
>My opinion is that Glance stagnates and it's really hard to implement new
>features there. In two years, only one major improvement was developed
>(Image Import Refactoring), and no one has tested it in production yet. And
>this is in the heyday of the community, as you said!

You're skipping 2 important things here:

The first one is that focusing on the image import refactor (IIR) was a
community choice. It's fixing a bigger problem that requires more focus. The
design of the feature took a couple of cycles too, not the implementation. The
second thing is that the slow pace may also be caused by the lack of
contributors.

>
>On the other hand OpenStack users have been requesting for new features for
>a long time: I'm talking about mutistore support, versioning of images,
>image slicing (like in docker), validation and conversion of uploading data
>and so on. And I can say that it is impossible to implement them without
>breaking Glance. But all this stuff is already done in Glare (multistore
>support is implemented partially, because modifications of glance_store are
>required). And if we switch OpenStack to Glare users will get these
>features out of the box.

Some of these features could be implemented in Glance. As you mentioned, the
code base is over-engineered but it could be simplified.

>Then, Glance works with images only, but Glare supports various types of
>data, like heat and tosca templates. Next week we will add Secrets artifact
>type to store private data, and Mistral workflows. I mean - we'll have
>unified catalog of all cloud data with the possibility to combine them in
>metastructures, when artifact of one type depends on the other.

Glance working only with images is a design choice and I don't think that's
something bad. I also don't think Glare's support for other artifacts is bad.
Just different choices.

>
>I will repeat it once again, in order to be understood as much as possible.
>It takes too much time to develop new features and fix old bugs (years to
>be exact). If we continue in the same spirit, it certainly will not
>increase the joy of OpenStack users and they will look for other solutions
>that meet their desires.

Mike, I understand that you think that the broader set of features that Glare
provides would be better for users, which is something I disagree with a bit.
More features don't make a service better. What I'm failing to see, though, is
why you believe that replacing Glance with Glare will solve the current problem.

I don't think the current problem is caused by Glance's lack of "exciting"
features and I certainly don't think replacing it with Glare would be of any
help now. It may be something we want to think about in the future (and this is
not the first time I say this) but what you're proposing will be an expensive
distraction from the real problem.

Flavio

--
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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