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On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 8:10 AM, Adam Young <ayoung at redhat.com> wrote:
> Oslo policy has been released as a stand alone library.  This is great, in
> that the rules engine is relatively non-applicaition specific, and I assume
> that all of the policy based project are planning to migrate over to using
> the policy library instead of the incubated version.
>
> Part of the push toward a more dynamic policy mechanism is figuring out how
> to fetch and cache the policy files from Keystone.  I suspect that the other
> services have the same issue.
>
> 1.  How long should a service hold on to the cached version of the policy
> file?
> 2.  How can we avoid the stampeding herd if Keystone pushes out a
> notification change event?
> 3.  How do we securely cache the file and still make it possible to debug.
>
> The PKI tokens have a lot of these same issues, and have a one-off mechanism
> for handling it.  We should probably look in to commonizing this function.
>
> There general mechanism should be "fetch and cache" but I think it should
> not be tied to keystone token validation so much as capable of using it if
> necessary.  I'm guessing that access to policy rules are typically
> controlled by auth token validated services.  Is this correct?
>
> Maybe the right level of abstraction is a callback function for fetching the
> file to be cached, with the default being something that uses
> python-requests, and then an  auth plugin based alternative for those that
> require Keystone tokens.
>
> Before I go off and write a spec, I'd like to know what the prior art is
> here.  I'd also like to know if there oslo policy library is part of the
> plans for the other groups that are doing policy based work?
>

Thanks Adam for bringing this up. As regards the group-based-policy
(GBP) project, we leverage the access control policy just like other
projects do, so the questions you raise above are definitely relevant
to GBP. We do not manage the lifecycle of this aspect of policy, so we
hope to use whatever comes out of this discussion.

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