As part of the series of cells patches for nova, there is one that adds a number of new commands to nova-manage that do direct database actions - https://review.openstack.org/#/c/15229 The consensus that seemed to come out of design summit was that nova-manage should be stripped of all it's db access (except for db-sync, for the obvious reason). That was somewhat codified in this blueprint - https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/apis-for-nova-manage Cells adds some complexity here. So to this it worth getting a more broad discussion outside of gerrit going on. I'll let Chris explain the approach from a cells perspective, and hopefully we can figure out if there is a way to handle this and still work on nova-manage removal. -Sean -- Sean Dague IBM Linux Technology Center email: sdague at linux.vnet.ibm.com alt-email: sldague at us.ibm.com