[Openstack] [RFC] OpenStack API

Vishvananda Ishaya vishvananda at gmail.com
Tue Jan 4 16:32:41 UTC 2011


Sure.  DevAPI perhaps?

Another point that might help clarify: Each component of Nova exposes an "api" to the other components in the system via python methods.  You could refer to these as the "internal api" for that component.  Both the OS api and the EC2 api use this internal api, for example, when they are running instance related commands. DevAPI (ReflectionAPI/EasyAPI) takes the "internal api" from all of the components and sews them up into a rest interface so they can be accessed via the cli.  I think this is the "best" way for developers to prototype components and interact with the system. This is probably not the best way for clients to access the system.  The "official" api exposed to clients needs to be a bit more rigorous with versioning, etc. and can lag behind the internal/dev api. The Openstack/Rackspace can continue to be the current versioned official api.

I think this division gives both developers and end users their optimal use case.

Vish

On Jan 4, 2011, at 5:57 AM, Ed Leafe wrote:

> On Jan 3, 2011, at 8:32 PM, Vishvananda Ishaya wrote:
> 
>> I feel very strongly that we need to keep the code easy to extend and prototype, without forcing developers to go through the process of api specs and versioning. I don't think this is going to happen through the OpenStack/Rackspace api, due to the reasons outlined above. The idea of EasyAPI is simply to expose the existing apis that we have for each component for easy consumption.  This allows us to have a simple command line utility to interact with the code we write for each component separately.
> 
> 	Is there any chance that you could change the name to something that sounds a little less judgmental? I.e., if it's not EasyAPI, it must be DifficultAPI! Maybe ReflectionAPI or something that describes the approach and not an opinion.
> 
> 
> 
> -- Ed Leafe
> 
> 
> 





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