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I agree that the priority at the moment for Nova should be getting our
EC2 implementation working well enough that it buys us time to
transition people to whatever the future may be.

Its unfortunate that we have approved the spec for this work in Kilo,
but I think that's an indication that we didn't realize that boto
would require new forms of auth in this release. I'm happy to discuss
this at the next nova meeting if people feel that's needed.

Michael

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 3:02 AM, Alexandre Levine
<alevine at cloudscaling.com> wrote:
> I'm writing this in regard to several reviews concering tagging
> functionality for EC2 API in nova.
> The list of the reviews concerned is here:
>
> https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/nova+branch:master+topic:bp/ec2-volume-and-snapshot-tags,n,z
>
> I don't think it's a good idea to merge these reviews. The analysis is
> below:
>
> Tagging in AWS
>
> Main goal for the tagging functionality in AWS is to be able to efficiently
> distinguish various resources based on user-defined criteria:
>
> "Tags enable you to categorize your AWS resources in different ways, for
> example, by purpose, owner, or environment.
> ...
> You can search and filter the resources based on the tags you add."
>
> (quoted from here:
> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Using_Tags.html)
>
> It means that one of the two main use-cases is to be able to use Tags as
> filter when you describe something. Another one is to be able to get
> information about particular tag with all of the resources tagged by it.
> Also there is a constraint:
>
> "You can tag public or shared resources, but the tags you assign are
> available only to your AWS account and not to the other accounts sharing the
> resource."
>
> The important part here is "shared resources" which are visible to different
> users but tags are not shared - each user sees his own.
>
> Existing implementation in nova
>
> Existing implementation of tags in nova's EC2 API covers only instances. But
> it does so in both areas:
> 1. Tags management (create, delete, describe,...)
> 2. Instances filtering (describe_instances with filtering by tags).
> The implementation is based on storing tags in each instance's metadata. And
> nova DB sqlalchemy level uses "tag:" in queries to allow instances
> describing with tag filters.
>
> I see the following design flaws in existing implementation:
>
> 1. It uses instance's own metadata for storing information about assigned
> tags.
> Problems:
> - it doesn't scale when you want to start using tags for other resources.
> Following this design decision you'll have to store tags in other resources
> metadata, which mean different services APIs and other databases. So
> performance for searching for tags or tagged resources in main use cases
> should suffer. You'll have to search through several remote APIs, querying
> different metadatas to collect all info and then to compile the result.
> - instances are not shared resources, but images are. It means that, when
> developed, metadata for images will have to store different tags for
> different users somehow.
>
> 2. EC2-specific code ("tag:" searching in novaDB sqlalchemy) leaked into
> lower layers of nova.
> - layering is violated. There should be no EC2-specifics below EC2 API
> library in nova, ideally.
> - each other service will have to implement the same solution in its own DB
> level to support tagging for EC2 API.
>
> Proposed review changes
>
> The review in question introduces tagging for volumes and snapshots. It
> follows design decisions of existing instance tagging implementation, but
> realizes only one of the two use cases. It provides "create", "delete",
> "describe" for tags. But it doesn't provide describe_volumes or
> describe_snapshots for filtering.
>
> It suffers from the design flaws I listed above. It has to query remote API
> (cinder) for metadata. It didn't implement filtering by "tag:" in cinder DB
> level so we don't see implementation of describe_volumes with tags
> filtering.
>
> Current stackforge/ec2-api tagging implementation
>
> In comparison, the implementation of tagging in stackforge/ec2-api, stores
> all of the tags and their links to resources and users in a separate place.
> So we can efficiently list tags and its resources or filter by tags during
> describing of some of the resources. Also user-specific tagging is
> supported.
>
> Conclusion
>
> Keeping in mind all of the above, and seeing your discussion about
> deprecation of EC2 API in nova, I don't feel it's a good time to add such a
> half-baked code with some potential problems into nova.
> I think it's better to concentrate on cleaning up, fixing, reviving and
> making bullet-proof whatever functionality is currently present in nova for
> EC2 and used by clients.
>
> Best regards,
>   Alex Levine
>
>
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