Open Stack

I am contemplating writing up a post-Folsom Blueprint for Keystone 
Federation and /or replication, and would like to solicit input from the 
community.

With Signed tokens,  we can provide the name of the Keystone server that 
signed the token.  With this comes the need to verify that the specified 
Keystone server is a valid server.  The logical way would be to check it 
against the service catalog.  I think the flow should go something like 
this:

when you start up a service like glance it should have a Keystone server 
specified.

When a token comes in with Keystone server that it does not recognize,  
it queries the known Keystone server's service catalog to see if the 
keystone server is a registered endpoint.  This service catalog can get 
cached for some short amount of time to ensure we don't trigger a flurry 
of activity on a series of bogus requests.

When a new Keystone server comes on line,  it gets registered with an 
existing Keystone server.  At this point, it requests its token signing 
certificate.  Once it recieves the signing cert, an  AMQP message then 
goes out to the other Keystone servers announcing the new keystone service.

Retirement of a Keystone server would be done in a similar way.

There are three scenarios I could see:

1)  No one Keystone server would hold a complete user or tenant list.  
Instead,  each would hold a subset of the tenants.  A user might exist 
in multiple Keystone databases if they are enrolled in multiple tenants, 
some of which are in one Keystone, some of which are in another.

2)  The entire user database is synchronized across all of the keystone 
instances.

3)  The Keystone instances use a single shared DBMS and are 
automatically synchronized.  Federation is just for redundancy and scaling.

I don't want to build this just to build it.  I'd like to know if A)  
there is a real need for Keystone Federation and B) If anyone else has 
thought through the problem and encountered issues I have not 
enumerated.  If there is enough interest, I will edit the discussion 
into a blueprint.