At last week's cinder meeting (5 December) we had a discussion about policy checks at the database layer. While these checks seem to make it difficult to perform some policy configurations, there are too many of them to simply remove them without impacting stability given our current test coverage (at least that's my feeling). Additionally, it's possible to handle the proposed use case (a read-only administrator) without making any code changes. So we decided to fix this issue by documenting how this could work. I've got a patch up for the documentation. I've flagged this email for cinder people to read for accuracy, operators to read to make sure the instructions are clear and detailed, and docs people to read for felicity of expression. Please leave comments on the patch: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/624424/ cheers, brian