Open Stack

Excerpts from Fox, Kevin M's message of 2017-03-11 21:31:40 +0000:
> No, they are treated as second class citizens. Take Trova again as an example. The underlying OpenStack infrastructure does not provide a good security solution for Trove's use case. As its more then just IaaS. So they have spent years trying to work around it on one way or another, each with horrible trade offs.
> 
> For example they could fix an issue by:
> 1. Run the service vm in the users tenant where it belongs. Though, currently the user has permissions to reboot the vm, login through the console and swipe any secrets that are on the vm and make it much harder for the cloud admin to administer.
> 2. Run the vm in a "trove" tenant. This fixes the security issue but breaks the quota model of OpenStack. Users with special host aggregate access/flavors can't work with this model.
> 
> For our site, we can't use Trove at all at the moment, even though we want to. Because option 2 doesn't work for us, and option 1 currently has a glaring security flaw in it.
> 
> One of the ways I saw Trove try to fix it was to get a feature into Nova called "Service VM's". VMs owned by the user but not fully controllable by them but from some other OpenStack service on their behalf. This, IMO is the right way to solve it. There are a lot of advanced services that need this functionality. But it seems to have been rejected, as "users don't need that"... Which is true, only if you only consider the IaaS use case.
> 

You're right. This type of rejection is not O-K IMO, because this is
consumers of Nova with a real use case, asking for real features that
simply cannot be implemented anywhere except inside Nova. Perhaps the
climate has changed, and this effort can be resurrected.

> The problems of these other OpenStack services are being rejected as second class problems, not primary ones.
> 
> I'm sure other sites are avoiding other OpenStack advanced services for similar reasons. its not just that Operators don't want to deploy it, or that Users are not asking for it.
> 
> Let me try and explain Zane's post in a sligtly different way... maybe that would help...
> 
> So, say you had an operating system. It had the ability to run arbitrary programs if the user started an executable via the keyboard/mouse. But had no ability for an executable to start another executable. How useful would that OS be? There would be no shell scripts. No non monolithic applications. It would be sort of functional, but would be hamstrung.
> 
> OpenStack is like that today. Like the DOS operating system. Programs are expected to be pretty self contained and not really talk back to the Operating System its running on, nor a way to discover other programs running on the same system. Nor really for a script running on the Operating System to start other programs, chaining them together in a way thats more useful then the sum of their parts. The current view is fine if you need is just a container to run a traditional OS in. Its not if you are trying to build an application that spans things.
> 
> There have been several attempts at fixing this, in Heat, in Murano, in the App Catalog, but plumbing they rely on isn't really supportive of it, as they believe the use case really is just launching a VM with an OS in it is really the important thing to do, and the job's done.
> 
> For the Applications Catalog to be successful, it needs the underlying cloud to have enough functionality among a common set of cloud provided services to allow applications developers to write cloud software that is redistributable and consumable by the end user. Its failed because the infrastructure just isn't there. The other advanced services are suffering from it too.
> 

I'm not sure I agree. One can very simply inject needed credentials
into a running VM and have it interact with the cloud APIs. However,
there is a deficiency that affects all VM users that might make this
a more desirable option.

There's a lack of a detailed policy management piece. What I'd really
like to inject is an API key that can only do the 2 things my app needs
(like, scale up load balancer, or allocate and attach a volume to itself).
Roles are just too opaque for that to really work well these days.