[openstack-tc] [OpenStack-TC] Agenda item proposal

John Griffith john.griffith at solidfire.com
Thu Apr 25 15:15:31 UTC 2013


Hey Folks,

With the growth of vendor activity in the form of driver submissions in
Cinder there's some concerns and challenges that I have and I'd like to get
some thoughts from the TC as I move forward.

The short version here is:
    "What is our goal with OpenStack WRT API behavior and implementation?"



The longer detailed version:

With the increased activity from Vendors in Cinder adding their drivers
there's some conflicts regarding  what should be required for acceptance.
 My position on this has been pretty simple (albeit unpopular) that if it's
supported by the reference implementation (LVM Driver) and it's a core API
call then those are your requirements.

In addition I feel that behaviors of the API should be standard regardless
of what driver is being used.  For example; a number of folks have proposed
that they should be able to do things like "delete a parent volume of a
snapshot" if the driver supports it, if the driver doesn't then just return
an error.

My response to this has been NO WAY, because the result is different
behaviors and expectations based on what driver is currently in use.  This
is very bad IMO because the whole point of Cinder from my perspective is to
abstract those differences and details out.  Adding functionality and
features on top of the reference implementation (via extensions, types etc)
is one thing, but deviating from the behavior is a very bad idea IMO.  It
would be one thing if there was no way to achieve what the vendor would
like to accomplish but the fact is in almost every one of these cases that
comes up there's a way to do what they would like, it just doesn't use the
vocabulary or semantics that they would like.

Anyway, I know we pushed the "what is OpenStack" back to the board at one
point and I don't recall ever seeing a clear response on that.  What I'd
like to do as a TC function is to actually define some sort of goal or
mission statement of what we are hoping to provide.  This doesn't have to
be a huge debate or a 1000 page manifesto, just a clear mission statement
on what an end user or provider should expect when they install OpenStack
projects and use the API.

I can continue to make my own calls on this which is fine with me, but I
suspect that other projects either are dealing with, or will be dealing
with this same sort of issue.  It might be worth discussing and putting
some sort of concept around what our goal is here.

Thanks,
John
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