Open Stack

> 
> 2. Could we not have plain vanilla EC2 at the top-level zone and do all the funky stuff under the hood, mapping EC2 artifacts to OS artifacts as needed? If EC2 wants 8-character with a prefix, we can map it to our UUID's across Zones, but with obvious limitations. If EC2 runs out of space in their identifiers, that's that. Either start using the OS API or use a new shard. We play the game ... to a point. When it no longer makes sense we don't try to put a square peg in a round hole. 
> 

This.

This seems like the easiest solution to me.  Have a mapping/compatibility layer at the top that maps ec2 ids to whatever the internal representation is.  These could be preallocated to zones, generated on demand, or the ec2 mapping layer could provide a callback service for the underlying zones to allocate unique ids.

Vish