Open Stack

Hey all,

Recently, Nova added support for multiple zones in the OpenStack API.
Using the nova-manage tool, you can get a list of instances in a
single zone or in multiple zones using the --recurse option. When just
querying a local zone's API server, the listed instance identifiers
will be integer IDs. When using the --recurse option, the listed
instance identifiers are UUIDs since they are globally unique.

Multiple zones is currently only supported in the OpenStack API, and
the question has been raised whether effort should be expended to get
parity in the EC2 API for this. The problem with the EC2 API is that
we do not have control over the instance identifiers -- they are an 8
character text string. We would still need to map the EC2 instance
identifier to some globally unique identifier (like a UUID), but the
solutions for how to do this aren't pretty (see
http://etherpad.openstack.org/EC2UUID).

Personally, I don't think it is worth expending the effort to get this
feature parity between the OpenStack API and the EC2 API, especially
considering we have little (or no) control over the EC2 API.

Thoughts?
-jay