Open Stack

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 10:44:51AM -0400, Adam Young wrote:
> What is keeping us from dropping the (scoped) token duration to 5 minutes?
> 
> 
> If we could keep their lifetime as short as network skew lets us, we would
> be able to:
> 
> Get rid of revocation checking.
> Get rid of persisted tokens.
> 
> OK,  so that assumes we can move back to PKI tokens, but we're working on
> that.
> 
> What are the uses that require long lived tokens?  Can they be replaced with
> a better mechanism for long term delegation (OAuth or Keystone trusts) as
> Heat has done?

FWIW I think you're misrepresenting Heat's usage of Trusts here - 2 minute
tokens will break Heat just as much as any other service:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/heat/+bug/1306294

http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-September/045585.html


Summary:

- Heat uses the request token to process requests (e.g stack create), which
  may take an arbitrary amount of time (default timeout one hour).

- Some use-cases demand timeout of more than one hour (specifically big
  TripleO deployments), heat breaks in these situations atm, folks are
  working around it by using long (several hour) token expiry times.

- Trusts are only used of asynchronous signalling, e.g Ceilometer signals
  Heat, we switch to a trust scoped token to process the response to the
  alarm (e.g launch more instances on behalf of the user for autoscaling)

My understanding, ref notes in that bug, is that using Trusts while
servicing a request to effectively circumvent token expiry was not legit
(or at least yukky and to be avoided).  If you think otherwise then please
let me know, as that would be the simplest way to fix the bug above (switch
to a trust token while doing the long-running create operation).

Trusts is not really ideal for this use-case anyway, as it requires the
service to have knowledge of the roles to delegate (or that the user
provides a pre-created trust), ref bug #1366133.  I suppose we could just
delegate all the roles we find in the request scope and be done with it,
given that bug has been wontfixed.

Steve