[Openstack] Pondering multi-tenant needs in nova.

Monsyne Dragon mdragon at rackspace.com
Thu Feb 3 01:37:57 UTC 2011


I am sorting out some possible implementations for the 
multi-tenant-accounting blueprint, and the related system-usage-records bp,
and I just wanted to run this by anyone interested in such matters.

Basically, for multitenant purposes we need to introduce the concept of 
an 'account' in nova, representing a customer,  that basically acts as a 
label for a group of resources (instances, etc), and for access control 
(i.e customer a cannot mess w/ customer b's stuff)

There was some confusion on how best to implement this, in relation to 
nova's project concept.  Projects are kind of like what we want an 
account to be, but there are some associations (like one project per 
network) which are not valid for our flat networking setup.  I am kind 
of straw-polling on which is better here:

The options are:
1) Create a new 'account' concept in nova,  with an account basically 
being a subgroup of a project (providers would use a single, default 
project, with additional projects added if needed for separate brands, 
or resellers, etc), add in access control per account as well as 
project, and make sure apis/auth specify account appropriately,  have 
some way for a default account to used (per project) so account doesn't 
get in the way for non-multitenant users.

2) having account == nova's "project", and changing the network 
associations, etc so projects can support our model (as well as current 
models).  Support for associating accounts (projects) together for 
resellers, etc would either be delegated outside of nova or added later 
(it's not a current requirement).

In either case, accounts would be identified by name, which would  be an 
opaque string an outside system/person would assign, and could structure 
to their needs (ie. for associating accounts with common prefixes, etc)

-- 

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     -Monsyne Dragon
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