Open Stack

Excerpts from Armando M.'s message of 2015-09-15 09:30:35 -0700:
> On 15 September 2015 at 08:04, Monty Taylor <mordred at inaugust.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hey all!
> >
> > If any of you have ever gotten drunk with me, you'll know I hate floating
> > IPs more than I hate being stabbed in the face with a very angry fish.
> >
> > However, that doesn't really matter. What should matter is "what is the
> > most sane thing we can do for our users"
> >
> > As you might have seen in the glance thread, I have a bunch of OpenStack
> > public cloud accounts. Since I wrote that email this morning, I've added
> > more - so we're up to 13.
> >
> > auro
> > citycloud
> > datacentred
> > dreamhost
> > elastx
> > entercloudsuite
> > hp
> > ovh
> > rackspace
> > runabove
> > ultimum
> > unitedstack
> > vexxhost
> >
> > Of those public clouds, 5 of them require you to use a floating IP to get
> > an outbound address, the others directly attach you to the public network.
> > Most of those 8 allow you to create a private network, to boot vms on the
> > private network, and ALSO to create a router with a gateway and put
> > floating IPs on your private ip'd machines if you choose.
> >
> > Which brings me to the suggestion I'd like to make.
> >
> > Instead of having our default in devstack and our default when we talk
> > about things be "you boot a VM and you put a floating IP on it" - which
> > solves one of the two usage models - how about:
> >
> > - Cloud has a shared: True, external:routable: True neutron network. I
> > don't care what it's called  ext-net, public, whatever. the "shared" part
> > is the key, that's the part that lets someone boot a vm on it directly.
> >
> > - Each person can then make a private network, router, gateway, etc. and
> > get floating-ips from the same public network if they prefer that model.
> >
> > Are there any good reasons to not push to get all of the public networks
> > marked as "shared"?
> >
> 
> The reason is simple: not every cloud deployment is the same: private is
> different from public and even within the same cloud model, the network
> topology may vary greatly.
> 
> Perhaps Neutron fails in the sense that it provides you with too much
> choice, and perhaps we have to standardize on the type of networking
> profile expected by a user of OpenStack public clouds before making changes
> that would fragment this landscape even further.
> 
> If you are advocating for more flexibility without limiting the existing
> one, we're only making the problem worse.

As with the Glance image upload API discussion, this is an example
of an extremely common use case that is either complex for the end
user or for which they have to know something about the deployment
in order to do it at all. The usability of an OpenStack cloud running
neutron would be enhanced greatly if there was a simple, clear, way
for the user to get a new VM with a public IP on any cloud without
multiple steps on their part. There are a lot of ways to implement
that "under the hood" (what you call "networking profile" above)
but the users don't care about "under the hood" so we should provide
a way for them to ignore it. That's *not* the same as saying we
should only support one profile. Think about the API from the use
case perspective, and build it so if there are different deployment
configurations available, the right action can be taken based on
the deployment choices made without the user providing any hints.

Doug

> 
> >
> > OH - well, one thing - that's that once there are two networks in an
> > account you have to specify which one. This is really painful in nova
> > clent. Say, for instance, you have a public network called "public" and a
> > private network called "private" ...
> >
> > You can't just say "nova boot --network=public" - nope, you need to say
> > "nova boot --nics net-id=$uuid_of_my_public_network"
> >
> > So I'd suggest 2 more things;
> >
> > a) an update to python-novaclient to allow a named network to be passed to
> > satisfy the "you have more than one network" - the nics argument is still
> > useful for more complex things
> >
> > b) ability to say "vms in my cloud should default to being booted on the
> > public network" or "vms in my cloud should default to being booted on a
> > network owned by the user"
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> 
> As I implied earlier, I am not sure how healthy this choice is. As a user
> of multiple clouds I may end up having a different user experience based on
> which cloud I am using...I thought you were partially complaining about
> lack of consistency?
> 
> >
> > Monty
> >
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