Open Stack

We've been tossing around a number of possibilities where this would be
useful, but here's an example: let's say you wanted to include a
configuration control panel along with an image. You have an image of a
firewall, but with a number of user-customizable settings. We'd store the
metadata about those settings alongside the image; then, when a user
creates a compute instance using that image, the extra control panel could
be generated by the front-end tool.

This would, for example, permit third parties to package up configurable
images without giving them access to our control panel. Moreover, other
third party services could use that metadata to generate their own
"control panels" or to automate services.

This could be done, on a small scale, via image properties, but I really
think that there are cases where there's too much metadata to handle in
that manner. Better to have an extension that holds the extra metadata and
stores it, returns it, etc. Then, when you fetch the /image/xx/details
resource, the configuration metadata could be passed along with it,
perhaps in a separate data structure.

The key is that the front-end using the API could use the /extensions
resource to determine which extensions are available and whether or not to
use them.





On 6/10/11 1:35 PM, "Jay Pipes" <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 11:49 PM, Glen Campbell
><glen.campbell at rackspace.com> wrote:
>> Hey, all ­ I've proposed a blueprint for adding extensions to the
>>Glance API
>> in a similar manner to the Compute API Jorge proposed:
>> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/glance/+spec/glance-api-extensions
>> This would IMHO be a really useful mechanism for companies like
>>Rackspace to
>> add business-specific features that really don't need to be in the core
>> code. We don't really want to fork the code to add our stuff, and those
>>seem
>> to be the only two options at the moment.
>> I'd appreciate your feedback.
>
>Hi Glen!
>
>I have no general problem with adding support for extensions into the
>Glance API, but I don't think I would implement it like the OS API
>1.1.
>
>Could you be so kind as to flesh out an example extension that
>Rackspace is interested in building? This would serve as a useful
>example and can get the discussion going a bit.
>
>Thanks!
>jay



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