Open Stack

Hi all,

Between recent IRC meetings and the mid-cycle operators meetup, we've
heard things ranging from "is the SDK project still around" to "I
can't wait for this." I'm Brian Curtin from Rackspace and I'd like to
tell you what the python-openstacksdk [0][1] project has been up to
lately.

After initial discussions, meetings [2], and a coordination session in
Atlanta, a group of us decided to kick off a project to offer a
complete Software Development Kit for those creating and building on
top of OpenStack. This project aims to offer a one-stop-shop to
interact with all of the parts of an OpenStack cloud, either writing
code against a consistent set of APIs, or by using command line tools
implemented on those APIs [3], with concise documentation and examples
that end-users can leverage.

>From a vendor perspective, it doesn't make sense for all of us to have
our own SDKs written against the same APIs. Additionally, every
service having their own client/CLI presents a fragmented view to
consumers and introduces difficulties once users move beyond
involvement with one or two services. Beyond the varying dependencies
and the sheer number of moving parts involved, user experience is not
as welcoming and great as it should be.

We first built transport and session layers based on python-requests
and Jamie Lennox's Keystone client authentication plugins (minus
compatibility cruft). The service resources are represented in a base
resource class, and we've implemented resources for interacting with
Identity, Object-Store, Compute, Image, Database, Network, and
Orchestration APIs. Expanding or adding support for new services is
straightforward, but we're thinking about the rest of the picture
before building out too far.

This resource layer may be slightly raw if you're looking at it as a
consumer, and not likely what you'd want in a full scale application.
Now that we have these resources exposed to work with, we're looking
upward to think about how an end-user would want to interact with a
service. We're also moving downward and looking at what we want to
provide to command line interfaces, such as easier access to the
JSON/dicts (as prodded by Dean :).

Overall, we're moving along nicely. While we're thinking about these
high-level/end-user views, I'd love to know if anyone has any thoughts
there. For example, what would the ideal interface to your favorite
service look like? As things are hacked out, we'll share them and
gather as much input as we can from this community as well as the
users.

If you're interested in getting involved or have any questions or
comments, we meet on Tuesdays at 1900 UTC in #openstack-meeting-3, and
all of us hang out in #openstack-sdks on Freenode.

As for who's involved, we're on stackalytics [4], but recently it has
been Terry Howe (HP), Jamie Lennox (Red Hat), Dean Troyer (Nebula),
Steve Lewis (Rackspace), and myself.

Thanks for your time


[0] https://github.com/stackforge/python-openstacksdk
[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/SDK-Development/PythonOpenStackSDK
[2] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/python_openstacksdk/2014/
[3] OpenStackClient is planning to switch to using the Python SDK
after the interfaces have stabilized.
[4] http://stackalytics.com/?project_type=stackforge&module=python-openstacksdk&release=all