Open Stack

Greetings,

We've talked a lot about requirements for new compute drivers [1].  I
think the same sort of standards shold be applied for a new third-party
API, such as the GCE API [2].

Before we can consider taking on a new API, it should have full test
suite coverage.  Ideally this would be extensions to tempest.  It should
also be set up to run on every Nova patch via CI.

Beyond that point, now is a good time to re-consider how we want to
support new third-party APIs.  Just because EC2 is in the tree doesn't
mean that has to be how we support them going forward.  Should new APIs
go into their own repositories?

I used to be against this idea.  However, as Nova's has grown, the
importance of finding the right spots to split is even higher.  My
objection was primarily based on assuming we'd have to make the Python
APIs stable.  I still do not think we should make them stable, but I
don't think that's a huge issue, since it should be mitigated by running
CI so the API maintainers quickly get notified when updates are necessary.

Taking on a whole new API seems like an even bigger deal than accepting
a new compute driver, so it's an important question.

If we went this route, I would encourage new third-party APIs to build
themselves up in a stackforge repo.  Once it's far enough along, we
could then evaluate officially bringing it in as an official sub-project
of the OpenStack Compute program.

Thoughts?

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix/DeprecationPlan
[2] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/gce-api

-- 
Russell Bryant