[openstack-dev] [python-openstacksdk] Status of python-openstacksdk project

Melvin Hillsman mrhillsman at gmail.com
Fri Aug 4 17:43:37 UTC 2017


rage-quit

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 11:52 AM, Monty Taylor <mordred at inaugust.com> wrote:

> On 08/04/2017 03:24 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>
>> Michael Johnson wrote:
>>
>>> I was wondering what is the current status of the python-openstacksdk
>>> project.  The Octavia team has posted some patches implementing our new
>>> Octavia v2 API [1] in the SDK, but we have not had any reviews.  I have
>>> also
>>> asked some questions in #openstack-sdks with no responses.
>>> I see that there are some maintenance patches getting merged and a pypi
>>> release was made 6/14/17 (though not through releases project).  I'm not
>>> seeing any mailing list traffic and the IRC meetings seem to have ended
>>> in
>>> 2016.
>>>
>>> With all the recent contributor changes, I want to make sure the project
>>> isn't adrift in the sea of OpenStack before we continue to spend
>>> development
>>> time implementing the SDK for Octavia. We were also planning to use it as
>>> the backing for our dashboard project.
>>>
>>> Since it's not in the governance projects list I couldn't determine who
>>> the
>>> PTL to ping would be, so I decided to ping the dev mailing list.
>>>
>>> My questions:
>>> 1. Is this project abandoned?
>>> 2. Is there a plan to make it an official project?
>>> 3. Should we continue to develop for it?
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for raising this.
>>
>> Beyond its limited activity, another issue is that it's not an official
>> project while its name make it a "default choice" for a lot of users
>> (hard to blame them for thinking that
>> http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/python-openstacksdk is not the
>> official Python SDK for OpenStack, but I digress). So I agree that the
>> situation should be clarified.
>>
>> I know that Monty has pretty strong feelings about this too, so I'll
>> wait for him to comment.
>>
>
> Oh boy. I'd kind of hoped we'd make it to the PTG before starting this
> conversation ... guess not. :)
>
> Concerns
> --------
>
> I share the same concerns Thierry listed above. Specifically:
>
> * It is not an official project, but its name leads people to believe it's
> the "right" thing to use if they want to talk to OpenStack clouds using
> Python.
>
> * The core team is small to begin with, but recently got hit in a major
> way by shifts in company priorities.
>
> I think we can all agree that those are concerns.
>
> Three additional points:
>
> * The OpenStack AppDev group and the various appdev hackathons use shade,
> not openstacksdk. This is what we have people out in the world recommending
> people use when they write code that consumes OpenStack APIs. The Interop
> challenges at the Summits so far have all used Ansible's OpenStack modules,
> which are based on shade, because they were the thing that works.
>
> * Both shade and python-openstackclient have investigated using
> openstacksdk as their REST layer but were unable to because it puts some
> abstractions in layers that make it impossible to do some of the advanced
> things we need.
>
> * openstacksdk has internal implementations of things that exist at
> different points in the stack. We just added full support for version
> service and version discovery to keystoneauth, but openstacksdk has its own
> layer for that so it both can't use the ksa implementation and is not
> compliant with the API-WG consume guidelines.
>
> It's not all bad! There is some **great** work in openstacksdk and it's a
> shame there are some things that make it hard to consume. Brian, Qiming and
> Terry have done a bunch of excellent work - and I'd like to not lose it to
> the dustbin of corporate shifting interest.
>
> **warning** - there is a very large text wall that follows. If you don't
> care a ton on this topic, please stop reading now, otherwise you  might
> rage-quit computers altogether.
>
> Proposal
> --------
>
> I'd propose we have the shade team adopt the python-openstacksdk codebase.
>
> This is obviously an aggressive suggestion and essentially represents a
> takeover of a project. We don't have the luxury of humans to work on things
> that we once had, so I think as a community we should be realistic about
> the benefits of consolidation and the downside to continuing to have 2
> different python SDKs.
>
> Doing that implies the following:
>
> * Rework the underlying guts of openstacksdk to make it possible to
> replace shade's REST layer with openstacksdk. openstacksdk still doesn't
> have a 1.0 release, so we can break the few things we'll need to break.
>
> * Update the shade mission to indicate its purpose in life isn't just
> hiding deployer differences but rather is to provide a holistic
> cloud-centric (rather than service-centric) end-user API library.
>
> * Merge the two repos and retire one of them. Specifics on the mechanics
> of this below, but this will either result in moving the resource and
> service layer in openstacksdk into shade and adding appropriate attributes
> to the shade.OpenStackCloud object, or moving the shade.OpenStackCloud into
> something like openstack.cloud and making a shade backwards-compate shim. I
> lean towards the first, as we've been telling devs "use shade to talk to
> OpenStack" at hackathons and bootcamps and I'd rather avoid the messaging
> shift. However, pointing to an SDK called "The Python OpenStack SDK" and
> telling people to use it certainly has its benefits from a messaging
> perspective.
>
> * Collapse the core teams - members of the python-openstacksdk-core team
> who desire to stick around (I see Qiming doing reviews still, and Brian has
> been doing occasional ones even after his day-job shift) are welcome to be
> added to the shade-core team, but should not feel compelled to or like
> they'd be letting anyone down if they didn't. Day job priorities shift, it
> turns out.
>
> Reworking the Guts
> ------------------
>
> I did a scan through openstacksdk the other day to catalog what would need
> to be reworked. The following are the big-ticket items:
>
> * drop stevedore/plugin support. An OpenStack REST client has no need for
> plugins. All services are welcome. *note below*
>
> * drop keystoneauth.Session subclass. It's over-riding things at the wrong
> layer. keystoneauth Adapter is the thing it wants to be.
>
> * stop using endpoint_filter in each Session call. Instead create an
> Adapter with the discovery parameters needed.
>
> * add support for per-request microversions. Based on the structure
> currently in openstacksdk once the wrapped Session has been replaced with
> keystoneauth Adapter this should work really nicely.
>
> * drop incomplete version discovery support in favor of the support in
> keystoneauth
>
> * drop Profile object completely and replace its use internally with the
> os-client-config CloudConfig object.
>
> That's not a ton of work, TBH- I could probably do all of it in a single
> long plane flight. It will break advanced users who might have been using
> Profile (should be transparent to normal users) but as there is no 1.0 I
> think we should live with that. We might be able to make a shim layer for
> the Profile interface to avoid breaking people using the interface.
>
> *note on plugins*
>
> shade has a philosophy of not using plugins for service support that I'd
> like to apply here. All OpenStack services are welcome to add code
> directly. openstacksdk ALREADY contains code for tons of services. The only
> thing plug-ability adds in this context is the ability to use openstacksdk
> to support non-OpenStack services... and at this point I do not think that
> is valuable. The only place this is currently used is in the Profile anyway
> which allows defining an entrypoint to use to override a service - and
> since I'm proposing we kill the Profile object this all falls out as a
> matter of consequence.
>
> Integrating with shade
> ----------------------
>
> The primary end-user concept in shade is an OpenStackCloud object, on
> which one performs actions. The service that provides the action is
> abstracted (this is done because actions such as 'list_images' may need to
> be done on the image service or the compute service, depending on the
> cloud). So a user does:
>
>   cloud = shade.openstack_cloud(cloud='example')
>   images = cloud.list_images()
>
> The primary end-user concept in openstacksdk is the Connection, which has
> an object for each service. For example:
>
>   conn = openstack.connection.from_config(cloud_name='example')
>   images = conn.image.images()
>
> If we merge the two with the shade library being the primary interface, we
> could add the current sdk service proxy objects as attributes to the
> OpenStackCloud object, so that the following would work:
>
>   cloud = shade.openstack_cloud(cloud='example')
>   images = cloud.list_images()
>   images = cloud.image.images()
>
> If we did the merge the other way, we could either keep the Connection
> concept and stitch the shade helpers on to it:
>
>   conn = openstack.connection.from_config(cloud_name='example')
>   images = conn.list_images()
>   images = conn.image.images()
>
> Or do a hybrid:
>
>   cloud = openstack.cloud(name='example')
>   images = cloud.list_images()
>   images = cloud.image.images()
>
> If we go either of the routes of merging shade into openstacksdk then the
> shade library itself could just be a simple sugar layer for backwards
> compat that has things like:
>
>   def openstack_cloud(cloud=None, *args, **kwargs):
>     return openstack.cloud(name=cloud, *args, **kwargs)
>
> and
>
>   class OpenStackCloud(openstack.cloud):
>     def __init__(self, cloud=None, *args, **kwargs):
>       super(OpenStackCloud, self).__init__(name=cloud, *args, **kwargs)
>
> I kind of like the 'Connection' term, as it communicates that this is a
> thing that has and shares a discrete remote connection (which is a shared
> keystoneauth Session) OpenStackCloud in shade **ACTUALLY** describes a
> cloud-region (as regions in OpenStack are essentially independent clouds
> from an API consumption perspective. So I may be leaning more towards
> merging in that direction.
>
> * data model - shade has a data model contract for the resources its knows
> about. This actually fits nicely with the Resource construct in
> openstacksdk, although there are some differences. We should likely push
> the data model and normalization contract into the openstacksdk resource
> layer so that people get matching resources regardless of whether they use
> the shade interop layer or the low-level per-service layer.
>
> * Implement some constructor smarts for easy pass-through of sdk service
> proxy methods into shade wrapper methods. For MANY of the remote calls, the
> list_ get_ search_ create_ update_ and delete_ methods are (or can be)
> mechanical passthrough from the SDK objects. We should be able to write
> some smart constructor logic that makes all the passthrough methods for us
> and just have explicit methods defined for the places where the shade layer
> legitimately needs to do a bunch of logic (like image upload and auto-ip
> support)
>
> * Make openstack.resource2.Resource a subclass of munch.Munch. This will
> be fun. If we want to be able to have model/normalization happen at the
> lower-level, we'd ultimately want the shade methods to be able to just
> return the object the sdk layer produces. Shade's interface defines that we
> return Munch objects (basically things that behave like dicts and objects)
> That's VERY similar to what the Resource already does - so if we subclass
> Munch the shade behavior will hold and the sdk coding style should also be
> able to hold as it is today. Otherwise we'd have to have every return in
> shade wrap the object in a munch.Munch(resource.to_dict()) which would
> lose information for when that object wants to be passed back in to the API
> later. (there are smarts in Resource for doing update things)
>
> * Migrate openstacksdk unit tests to use requests_mock. We're pretty much
> finished doing this in shade and it's been SUPER helpful. openstacksdk has
> a mock of the Session object in test_proxy_base2.py, so there's some good
> places to lay this in ... and as we merge the two obviously shade's
> requests_mock unittests will continue to apply - but given the sdk's test
> organization I think we can get some really solid results by moving the
> mocking to the actual rest payload layer instead of mocking out the Session
> itself. It also is a great way to verify that things work as expected with
> varying payloads - so as a user finds an edge-case from a specific cloud,
> grabbing an http trace from them and constructing a specific test is a
> great way to deal with regressions.
>
> We'll also need to make a specific rollout plan. shade has a strict
> backwards-compat policy, so if we merge sdk into shade, it goes from being
> 0.9 to being fully supported very quickly and we need to make sure we don't
> have anything exposed in a public interface we don't want to support for
> ages (resource -> resource2 should likely get finished and then resource2
> should likely get renamed back to resource before such a release, for
> instance) If we merge the other direction and make the current shade a
> backwards-compat shim lib, we'll also need to cut a 1.0 of sdk pretty
> quickly, as whatever passthrough object we are exposing via the shade layer
> from sdk just adopted the shade backwards compat contract. I don't have a
> detailed plan for this yet, but if we decide to go down this path I'll make
> one.
>
> Other TODO list items
> ---------------------
>
> It's not just all grunt work nobody can see. There's fun things to do too!
>
> * Add openstack.OpenStack or shade.AllClouds class - It's been a todo-list
> item for me for a while to make a wrapper class in shade that allows easy
> operations on a set of Clouds. Again, I like the semantics of
> openstack.OpenStack better - so that's another argument in favor of that
> direction of merge ... it would look something like this:
>
>   # make Connection objects for every cloud-region in clouds.yaml
>   clouds = openstack.OpenStack()
>   # thread/asyncio parallel fetch of images across all clouds
>   images = clouds.list_images()
>   # all objects in shade have a "location" field which contains
>   # cloud, region, domain and project info for the resource
>   print([image for image in images if image.location.cloud='vexxhost'])
>   # Location is a required parameter for creation
>   vexxhost = clouds.get_location(name='vexxhost')
>   clouds.create_image(
>     location=vexxhost, name='my-fedora-26',
>     filename='fedora26.qcow2')
>
> Most of this work can actually likely be done with one smart metaclass ...
> finding the methods on OpenStackCloud and either doing a set of parallel
> gets on a list of objects or adding a location argument to write operations
> doesn't vary depending on the type of object. Since all the methods are
> named consistently, finding 'list_*' and making a set of corresponding
> list_ methods on the OpenStack object is essentially just one chunk of
> smart constructor.
>
> * Finish per-resource caching / batched client-side rate-limiting work.
> shade has a crazy cool ability to do batched and rate-limited operations
> ... this is how nodepool works at the scale it does. But it's currently
> only really plumbed through for server, floating-ip and port. (guess what
> nodepool has to deal with) This should be generalized to all of the
> resources, configurable on a per-resource name in clouds.yaml, and should
> work whether high or low level interfaces are used. This is super hard to
> get RIGHT, so it's one of those "spend 4 weeks writing 10 lines of code"
> kind of things, but it's also super important.
>
> * Implement a flag for toggling list/client-side-filter vs. remote-get
> operations. Most single-resource operations in shade are actually done as a
> list followed by a client-side filter. Again this model is there to support
> nodepool-scale (amusingly enough it makes it less load on the clouds at
> scale) but at small scale it is more costly and some users find it
> annoying. We've discussed having the ability to toggle this at constructor
> time - and then having things like the ansible modules default the flag to
> use remote-get instead of list/filter - since those are doing lots of
> independent processes so the optimization of list/filter isn't ever
> realized.
>
> * Implement smarter and more comprehensive "pushdown" filtering. I think
> we can piggyback a bunch of this off of the SDK layer - but there are
> attributes that can be used for server-side filtering, there are attributes
> that can't, and there are attributes that are client-side created via
> normalization that either can be translated into a server-side filter or
> must be client-side filtered. Resource has the structure for dealing with
> this sanely I believe, but it needs to be tracked through.
>
> * Add python3-style type annotations. We just started doing this in zuul
> and it's pretty cool - and is possible to do in a python2 compatible way.
>
> Longer Goals
> ------------
>
> That gets us a home for openstacksdk, a path towards consolidation of
> effort and a clear story for our end users. There are a few longer-term
> things we should be keeping in mind as we work on this:
>
> * suitability for python-openstackclient. Dean and Steve have been laying
> in the groundwork for doing direct-REST in python-openstackclient because
> python-*client are a mess from an end-user perspective and openstacksdk
> isn't suitable. If we can sync on requirements hopefully we can produce
> something that python-openstackclient can honestly use for that layer
> instead of needing local code.
>
> * suitability for heat/horizon - both heat and horizon make calls to other
> OpenStack services as a primary operation (plenty of services make
> service-to-service calls, but for heat and horizon is a BIG part of their
> life) The results of this work should allow heat and horizon to remove
> local work they have using python-*client, doing local version discovery or
> any of the rest - and should expose to them rich primitives they can use
> easily.
>
> Conclusion
> ----------
>
> As I mentioned at the top, I'd been thinking some of this already and had
> planned on chatting with folks in person at the PTG, but it seems we're at
> a place where that's potentially counter productive.
>
> Depending on what people think I can follow this up with some governance
> resolutions and more detailed specs.
>
> Thanks!
> Monty
>
>
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-- 
Kind regards,

Melvin Hillsman
mrhillsman at gmail.com
mobile: (832) 264-2646
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