Open Stack

Hi all,

(I'm resending this from home to avoid the DMARC->SPAM issue)

At Yahoo, load balancing is heavily used throughout our stack for both HA and
load distribution, even within the OpenStack control plane itself. This involves a
variety of technologies, depending on scale and other requirements. For large
scale + L7 we use Apache Traffic Server, while L3DSR is the mainstay of the
highest bandwidth applications and a variety of technologies are used for simple
HA and lighter loads. 

Each of these technologies has its own special operational requirements, and although
a single well-abstracted tenant-facing API to control all of them is much to be desired,
there can be no such luck for operators. A major concern for us is insuring that when a
tenant* has an operational issue they can communicate needs and concerns with
operators quickly and effectively. This means that any operator API must @speak the
same language as the user API while exposing the necessary information and controls
for the underlying technology.

*In this case a @tenant might represent a publicly-exposed URL with tens of millions of
users or an unexposed service which could impact several such web destinations.

                      -Ed