Open Stack

On 07/26/2013 11:53 AM, Ben Nemec wrote:
> 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.

Absolutely agree with you, Ben. There certainly is opportunity there. 
But in 3 years of working in the OpenStack community, we've had this 
conversation multiple times and nobody has exploited the opportunity...

Best,
-jay