Open Stack

On 10/17/2016 11:14 PM, Ed Leafe wrote:
> Now that we’re starting to model some more complex resources, it seems that some of the original design decisions may have been mistaken. One approach to work around this is to create multiple levels of resource providers. While that works, it is unnecessarily complicated IMO. I think we need to revisit some basic assumptions about the design before we dig ourselves a big design hole that will be difficult to get out of. I’ve tried to summarize my thoughts in a blog post. I don’t presume that this is the only possible solution, but I feel it is better than the current approach.
>
> https://blog.leafe.com/virtual-bike-sheds/

I commented on your blog, but leave it here for posterity:

First, one of the reasons for the resource providers work was to 
*standardize* as much as possible the classes of resource that a cloud 
provides. Without standardized resource classes, there is no 
interoperability between clouds. The proposed solution of creating 
resource classes for each combination of actual resource class (the 
SRIOV VF) and the collection of traits that the VF might have (physical 
network tag, speed, product and vendor ID, etc) means there would be no 
interoperable way of referring to a VF resource in one OpenStack cloud 
as provided the same thing in another OpenStack cloud. The fact that a 
VF might be tagged to physical network A or physical network B doesn’t 
change the fundamentals: it’s a virtual function on an SR-IOV-enabled 
NIC that a guest consumes. If I don’t have a single resource class that 
represents a virtual function on an SR-IOV-enabled NIC (and instead I 
have dozens of different resource classes that refer to variations of 
VFs based on network tag and other traits) then I cannot have a 
normalized multi-OpenStack cloud environment because there’s no 
standardization.

Secondly, the compute host to SR-IOV PF is only one relationship that 
can be represented by nested resource providers. Other relationships 
that need to be represented include:

* Compute host to NUMA cell relations where a NUMA cell provides both 
VCPU, MEMORY_MB and MEMORY_PAGE_2M and MEMORY_PAGE_1G inventories that 
are separate from each other but accounted for in the parent provider 
(meaning the compute host’s MEMORY_MB inventory is logically the 
aggregate of both NUMA cells’ inventories of MEMORY_MB). In your data 
modeling, how would you represent two NUMA cells, each with their own 
inventories and allocations? Would you create resource classes called 
NUMA_CELL_0_MEMORY_MB and NUMA_CELL_1_MEMORY_MB etc? See point above 
about one of the purposes of the resource providers work being the 
standardization of resource classification.

* NIC bandwidth and NIC bandwidth per physical network. If I have 4 
physical NICs on a compute host and I want to track network bandwidth as 
a consumable resource on each of those NICs, how would I go about doing 
that? Again, would you suggest auto-creating a set of resource classes 
representing the NICs? So, NET_BW_KB_EKB_ENP3S1, NET_BW_KB_ENP4S0, and 
so on? If I wanted to see the total aggregate bandwidth of the compute 
host, the system will now have to have tribal knowledge built into it to 
know that all the NET_BW_KB* resource classes are all describing the 
same exact resource class (network bandwidth in KB) but that the 
resource class names should be interpreted in a certain way. Again, not 
standardizable. In the nested resource providers modeling, we would have 
a parent compute host resource provider and 4 child resource providers — 
one for each of the NICs. Each NIC would have a set of traits 
indicating, for example, the interface name or physical network tag. 
However, the inventory (quantitative) amounts for network bandwidth 
would be a single standardized resource class, say NET_BW_KB. This 
nested resource providers system accurately models the real world setup 
of things that are providing the consumable resource, which is network 
bandwidth.

Finally, I think you are overstating the complexity of the SQL that is 
involved in the placement queries. 🙂 I’ve tried to design the DB schema 
with an eye to efficient and relatively simple SQL queries — and keeping 
quantitative and qualitative things decoupled in the schema was a big 
part of that efficiency. I’d like to see specific examples of how you 
would solve the above scenarios by combining the qualitative and 
quantitative aspects into a single resource type but still manage to 
have some interoperable standards that multiple OpenStack clouds can expose.

Best,
-jay