Open Stack

On 2013-07-26 10:39, Jay Pipes wrote:
> On 07/26/2013 08:04 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
>> On 07/25/2013 08:30 PM, Joshua Harlow wrote:
>>> When you have so much state to maintain then aren't the APIs 
>>> incorrect??
>> 
>> Yes, the EC2 APIs are incorrect in being silly and using ints for ids
>> for so many things, also for supporting people to make GET requests 
>> with
>> 16k get strings. But there isn't much we can do about that. :)
>> 
>>> Or can there be new API's that expose this translation, something
>>> seems/feels wrong if there is so much state to maintain u can't do a
>>> translation layer.
>> 
>> Most of this is about id allocation and translation. OpenStack uses
>> UUIDs, AWS uses ints. UUIDs is a better design point, and means you
>> don't need to have a global auto allocator which you can guaruntee,
>> which is good.
>> 
>> Also there are EC2 design points that have request lengths greater 
>> than
>> what Apache (or any other web front end) is compiled to support, as 
>> they
>> have the possibility of enourmous GET strings (16K at least). Again,
>> instead of sensibly requiring to move to POST in those cases. I know 
>> we
>> had to land a change for CERN to allow bigger requests on EC2 calls 
>> for
>> just this reason (we did keep the get length apache sized on OSAPI, so
>> we didn't break people's attempts to get this behind a real web 
>> server).
>> 
>> Translation is never exact, go talk to the WINE folks about that one.
>> 
>> I'm personally fine either way, proxy or embedded in openstack. Which
>> approach isn't really the issue. It's that no one is doing the work.
>> Actions speak much louder than words (well... except in pundit echo
>> chambers), so I'd much rather have people with strong opinions on this
>> express how strongly those are by having a big patch queue for me to
>> review.
> 
> Amen that that.
> 
> However, I will say that developers write code to scratch an itch --
> or some product manager's itch. So the fact that nobody is all that
> interested in spending time to code up enhanced EC2 API support in
> Nova is, well, quite telling that the demand for such things is less
> than what some people think.

I'm not sure this is a safe assumption to make.  It's only natural that 
the companies/people who are working on OpenStack would be more 
interested in the OS API, but that doesn't mean there aren't AWS users 
out there who would like to migrate off but don't have the expertise to 
contribute to OpenStack.

None of which changes the fact that without developer interest nothing 
is going to get done, but I still think it's important to keep in mind 
that developer interest does not necessarily equal user interest.  The 
fact that nobody is currently working on it doesn't mean there isn't an 
opportunity here.

-Ben