[openstack-dev] [glance][horizon] Issues we found when using Community Images

Andy Botting andy at andybotting.com
Wed Aug 22 21:31:36 UTC 2018


Hi all,

We've recently moved to using Glance's community visibility on the Nectar
Research Cloud. We had lots of public images (12255), and we found it was
becoming slow to list them all and the community image visibility seems to
fit our use-case nicely.

We moved all of our user's images over to become community images, and left
our 'official' images as the only public ones.

We found a few issues, which I wanted to document, if anyone else is
looking at doing the same thing.

-> Glance API has no way of returning all images available to me in a
single API request (https://bugs.launchpad.net/glance/+bug/1779251)
The default list of images is perfect (all available to me, except
community), but there's a heap of cases where you need to fetch all images
including community. If we did have this, my next points would be a whole
lot easier to solve.

-> Horizon's support for Community images is very lacking (
https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1779250)
On the surface, it looks like Community images are supported in Horizon,
but it's only as far as listing images in the Images tab. Trying to boot a
Community image from the Launch Instance wizard is actually impossible, as
community images don't appear in that list at all. The images tab in
Horizon dynamically builds the list of images on the Images tab through new
Glance API calls when you use any filters (good).
In contrast, the source tab on the Launch Images wizard loads all images at
the start (slow with lots of images), then relies on javascript client-side
filtering of the list. I've got a dirty patch to fix this for us by
basically making two Glance API requests (one without specifying
visibility, and another with visibility=community), then merging the data.
This would be better handled the same way as the Images tab, with new
Glance API requests when filtering.

-> Users can't set their own images as Community from the dashboard
Should be relatively easy to add this. I'm hoping to look into fixing this
soon.

-> Murano / Sahara image discovery
These projects rely on images to be chosen when creating new environments,
and it looks like they use a glance list for their discovery. They both
suffer from the same issue and require their images to be non-community for
them to find their images.

-> Openstack Client didn't support listing community images at all (
https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2001925)
It did support setting images to community, but support for actually
listing them was missing.  Support has  now been added, but not sure if
it's made it to a release yet.

Apart from these issues, our migration was pretty successful with minimal
user complaints.

cheers,
Andy
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