Open Stack

This is mostly directed at operators but I'm cross-posting to the ops 
and dev lists.

First, does anyone use the os-hosts API and if so, for what use cases?

The os-hosts and os-services APIs are very similar, and they work on the 
same resources (the 'services' records in the nova database).

Both APIs allow you to list services and show details for a specific 
service.

Both APIs allow you to enable and disable a service so instances will 
not be scheduled to that service (compute host).

There are some additional 'action' APIs that are specific to the 
os-hosts API, which are:

1. Putting the service (host) into maintenance mode. This is only 
implemented by the XenServer virt driver and despite the description in 
the support matrix [1] I'm told that it doesn't actually evacuate all of 
the guests from the host, it just sets a flag in the Xen management 
console, and is therefore pretty useless. Regardless, we have other APIs 
that allow you to do the same thing which are supported across all virt 
drivers, which would be disabling a service and then migrating the 
instances off that host.

2. Reboot host. This is only supported by the XenServer and Hyper-v 
drivers. This is also arguably something that does not need to live in 
the compute API. As far as I know, the backing drivers do no 
orchestration of dealing with guests in the nova database when 
performing a reboot of the host. The compute service for that host may 
be temporarily disabled by the service group health check which would 
take it out of scheduling decisions, and the guests would be down, but 
the periodic task which checks for unexpectedly stopped instances runs 
in the nova-compute service, which might be dead now so the nova API 
would show the instances as running when in fact they are actually stopped.

3. Shutdown host. Same as #2 for reboot host.

4. Start host. This is literally not supported by any in-tree virt 
drivers. The only drivers that implement the 'host_power_action' method 
are XenServer and Hyper-v and they do not support the 'startup' action. 
Since this is an RPC call from nova-api to nova-compute, you will at 
least get a 501 error response indicating it is not supported or 
implemented (even though 501 is the wrong response for something like this).

--

So is anyone using any of these APIs? As noted, only Xen users can use 
the maintenance mode API but I'm told it's useless. Which leaves the 
stop/reboot power action APIs, which are only for XenServer and Hyper-v. 
Are there any users of those drivers that use those APIs and if so, why?

If no one uses any of those power action or maintenance APIs, then we 
propose to deprecate the os-hosts API. The list/show/enable/disable APIs 
are already covered by the os-services API which we actually intend to 
improve [2] so those would be the replacement.

[1] 
https://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/support-matrix.html#operation_maintenance_mode
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/447149/

-- 

Thanks,

Matt