Open Stack

Good conversation guys. Certainly something we need to get settled out sooner than later.

On naming:

No matter how we shake it out (prefixes, mac address, time, etc), we're essentially fabricating our own form of UUID ... trying to pick some unique qualifier(s) to avoid collisions. 

I think the real driver is making something that is as-short-as-possible and mnemonic enough that a user could look at it and say "yup, that's mine". Personally, I find UUID's to be ugly monsters and think URN's are better for providing a mnemonic for remembering names. 

Given: "6373-ba62-9847-feab-b72a-00dd" vs. "rax:ord:zone3:rack2:cust29:inst383" ... give me a URN anytime. However, this does pose security risks by exposing internal layouts. 

We currently allow a user supplied friendly name but under-the-hood use the instance ID. Since customers use different auth credentials their instances live in different Projects and there is no conflict. Duplicate names are allowed across customers (even within customers?) Downside is there are no hints for routing from names.

On bursting: 

Currently, the Instance ID is fabricated in the zone where the create() call was handled. This Instance ID is treated like a Reservation # which is returned to the user for later follow-up (since provisioning can take a while).

The way I currently envision bursting with zones is that the commercial zones would be the leaf zones in a deployment. That is, instances would be provisioned locally first (depending on Server Best Match) due to their low weight scores and ultimately "burst" through the bottom of the zone tree to the commercial cloud. 

I think this works well. If I have a hybrid cloud and issue 'nova list' I would see something like:

"sleepy" - com:myco:development:inst1
"dopey" - com:myco:development:inst2
"blinky" - com:myco:development:inst3
"inky" - rax:ord:zone3:rack2:cust293:inst393
"pinky" - rax:ord:zone2:rack34:cust293:inst8746
"clyde" - bobscloud:basement:shelf2:cust9:inst8

and get a good idea of what's what.



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