Open Stack

On 2013-07-26 12:38, Russell Bryant wrote:
> 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.
> 
> If that demand is communicated by customers to vendors contributing to
> OpenStack, and it is a higher priority than other things customers are
> asking for, it will get worked on.  That just hasn't seemed to be the
> case based on contribution activity.

Fair enough.  Just wanted to make sure we weren't stuck in a developer 
echo chamber and it sounds like we aren't, at least to the extent that 
it's possible for us to know.

-Ben