Open Stack

Excerpts from Monty Taylor's message of 2016-05-03 07:59:21 -0700:
> On 05/03/2016 08:55 AM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps we have different perspectives. How is accepting what we
> > previously emitted and told the user would be valid sneaky or wrong?
> > Sounds like common sense due diligence to me.
> 
> I agree - I see no reason we can't validate previously emitted tokens. 
> But I don't agree strongly, because re-authing on invalid token is a 
> thing users do hundreds of times a day. (these aren't oauth API Keys or 
> anything)
> 

Sure, one should definitely not be expecting everything to always work
without errors. On this we agree for sure. However, when we do decide to
intentionally induce errors for reasons we have not done so before, we
should weigh the cost of avoiding that with the cost of having it
happen. Consider this strawman:

- User gets token, it says "expires_at Now+4 hours"
- User starts a brief set of automation tasks in their system
  that does not use python and has not failed with invalid tokens thus
  far.
- Keystone nodes are all updated at one time (AMAZING cloud ops team)
- User's automation jobs fail at next OpenStack REST call
- User begins debugging, wasting hours of time figuring out that
  their tokens, which they stored and show should still be valid, were
  rejected.

And now they have to refactor their app, because this may happen again,
and they have to make sure that invalid token errors can bubble up to the
layer that has the username/password, or accept rolling back and
retrying the whole thing.

I'm not saying anybody has this system, I'm suggesting we're putting
undue burden on users with an unknown consequence. Falling back to UUID
for a while has a known cost of a little bit of code and checking junk
tokens twice.