Open Stack

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Rosmaita <brian.rosmaita at rackspace.com>
Reply: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Date: February 22, 2016 at 08:14:38
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com>
Subject:  Re: [openstack-dev] [glance]one more use case for Image Import Refactor from OPNFV

> Hello everyone,
>  
> Joe, I think you are proposing a perfectly legitimate use case, but it's
> not what the Glance community is calling "image import", and that's
> leading to some confusion.
>  
> The Glance community has defined "image import" as: "A cloud end-user has
> a bunch of bits that they want to give to Glance in the expectation that
> (in the absence of error conditions) Glance will produce an Image (record,
> file) tuple that can subsequently be used by other OpenStack services that
> consume Images." [0]
>  
> The server-side image import workflow allows operators to validate the
> bits an end-user has uploaded, with the extent of the validation performed
> determined by the operator. For example, a public cloud may wish to make
> sure the bits are in the correct format for that cloud so that "bad"
> images can be caught at import time, rather than at boot time, to ensure a
> better user experience.

Correct. Nothing in what we're talking about right now will be of much use to Joe.

> The use case you're talking about takes images that are already "in" a
> cloud, for example, a snapshot of a server that's been configured exactly
> the way you want it, and moving them to a different cloud. In the past,
> the Glance community has referred to this use case as "image cloning" (or
> region-to-region image transfer). There are some old design docs up on
> the wiki discussing this (I think [1] gives a good outline and it's got
> links to some other docs). Those docs are from 2013, though, so they
> can't be resurrected as-is since Glance has changed a bit in the meantime,
> but you can look them over and at least see if I'm correct that image
> cloning captures what you want.
>  
> As I said, the idea has been floated several times, but never got enough
> traction to be implemented. Maybe its time has come!

Right, we've floated the idea several times about image cloning, and there is a need for it (according to operators I've spoken to) but we've had higher priorities in past cycles that have prevented us from getting around to working on image cloning. I suspect Newton will be much the same as we continue to work on image import (which I expect will be our main focus for Newton).

Maybe after we have image import nailed down and implemented and Nova using v2, we can then focus on image cloning and Glare better.

--  
Ian Cordasco