Open Stack

At the last developers summit, it was noted by many, that the idea of
a volume snaphsot in the cloud is highly overloaded.  EBS uses the
notion of snapshots for making point in time backups of a volume that
can be used to create a new volume from.  These are not true snapshots
though from a storage world view.  Because of this I would like to
make the following proposal:

Add a backup API to the Openstack API for Nova Volume.  This is to
provide EBS style snapshot functionality in the Openstack API.  I'm
proposing to name it backup instead of snapshot as that seems to
better describe what is happening.  It also allows room for other
storage backends to expose real snapshot capabilities down the road.

In the case of Lunr, we would be making backups of volumes to swift
(possibly abstracted through glance in the future).

I have started a blueprint and spec at:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/backups-api
http://etherpad.openstack.org/volume-backup

Please feel free to comment and contribute.

--
Chuck