Open Stack

On Fri, 30 Jan 2015, Everett Toews wrote:

> To converge the OpenStack APIs to a consistent and pragmatic RESTful
> design by creating guidelines that the projects should follow. The
> intent is not to create backwards incompatible changes in existing
> APIs, but to have new APIs and future versions of existing APIs
> converge.

This is pretty good but I think it leaves unresolved the biggest
question I've had about this process: What's so great about
converging the APIs? If we can narrow or clarify that aspect, good
to go.

The implication with your statement above is that there is some kind
of ideal which maps, at least to some extent, across the rather
diverse set of resources, interactions and transactions that are
present in the OpenStack ecosystem. It may not be your intent but
the above sounds like "we want all the APIs to be kinda similar in
feel" or "when someone is using an OpenStack-related API they'll be
able to share some knowledge between then with regard to how stuff
works".

I'm not sure how realistic^Wuseful that is when we're in an
environment with APIs with such drastically different interactions
as (to just select three) Swift, Nova and Ceilometer.

We've seen this rather clearly in the recent debates about handling
metadata.

Now, there's nothing in what you say above that actually straight
out disagrees with my response, but I think there's got to be some
way we can remove the ambiguity or narrow the focus. The need to
remove ambiguity is why the discussion of having a mission statement
came up.

I think where we want to focus our attention is:

* strict adherence to correct HTTP
* proper use of response status codes
* effective (and correct) use of a media types
* some guidance on how to deal with change/versioning
* and _maybe_ a standard for providing actionable error responses
* setting not standards but guidelines for anything else

For most of that there is prior art and/or active conversation going
on outside the OpenStack world which ought to be useful fodder.

-- 
Chris Dent tw:@anticdent freenode:cdent
https://tank.peermore.com/tanks/cdent