Open Stack

On Jan 31, 2013, at 12:17 PM, Stephen Gran <stephen.gran at guardian.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> At work we use the EC2 tags API quite heavily for all sorts of things,
> so I've been tasked with getting it implemented for openstack.
> 
> As some background, the EC2 API offers 3 API calls: CreateTags,
> DeleteTags and DescribeTags, as well as a way to filter a search for a
> resource by tags (by passing {"filter": [{"tag:key": "value"}]} or
> {"filter": [{"tag-key": "value"}]} as parameters to an API call like
> DescribeInstances or DescribeSecurityGroups.
> 
> The API references are here:
> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/ApiReference-query-CreateTags.html
> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/ApiReference-query-DeleteTags.html
> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/ApiReference-query-DescribeTags.html
> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/ApiReference-query-DescribeInstances.html
> (and other Describe* resource searches)
> 
> The part of this that seems awkward to overlay onto openstack's database
> schema is that tags can be applied to multiple resource types - eg, when
> a stack is cloudformed, all the instances, load balancers, security
> groups, etc are tagged with the cloudformation name.
> 
> I can see two ways of implementing this: 
> 
> 1) Reuse the existing instance-metadata table and start creating
> security-group metadata tables and so on.  This approach has the
> downside that resources that are served by cinder or quantum will be
> awkward - we'd have to add equivalent API calls to them and call their
> API.

It seems like the openstack api needs to grow support for metadata on all objects, so
I think adding api calls is the right long term goal.

> 
> 2) Create a new tags table containing references to the resource type
> and ID.  This has the advantage that we won't need to make lots of API
> calls to return all the resources with a given tag, but also feels
> possibly over-denormalized (is that a word?).

This would be the fastest way to implement the feature, but I suspect we will end up
with some pretty nasty querys to do filters by tags in this model.

> 
> I have a proof of concept implementation that takes the second approach,
> but only provides an EC2 API without the equivalent nova API, and only
> provides the filtering for DescribeInstances.  It can of course be
> extended - this was mostly me getting familiar with the code base.
> 
> Please let me know what you think.  As we use this at work, I'll be
> quite happy to provide the implementation, once it's agreed how this
> should look.


Thanks for bringing this up. I'm leaning towards 1 even though it will be more work.

Vish

> 
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Stephen Gran
> Senior Systems Integrator - guardian.co.uk
> 
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