Open Stack

All:

I wanted to discuss the usability of the paste config files from an operator's point of view. The paste config files are opaque to administrators who are trying to stand an OpenStack cloud for the first time, since they expose a lot of implementation details about the middleware. I can follow the instructions in the Install and Deploy guide, but I have no idea what the options I don't edit are, and if the documentation has deviated from the implementation, I'm pretty much stuck.

As an example, the install and deploy guide says to add authtoken to the pipeline:glance-api section in glance-api-paste.ini <http://docs.openstack.org/essex/openstack-compute/install/content/configure-glance-files.html>, the example in the docs looks like this:

[pipeline:glance-api]
pipeline = versionnegotiation authtoken auth-context apiv1app

If I install from packages on precise, there's also some lines that look like this:

[pipeline:glance-api-keystone]
pipeline = versionnegotiation authtoken context apiv1app


It looks similar, and it has "keystone" in there, so maybe that's intended to be used for keystone? And it looks pretty similar, but there's a "auth-context" instead of "context". Maybe the pipeline:glance-api-keystone is used for something else in glance? In the end, I'm just going to slavishly follow the documentation, and I have no mental model of what these options do. 

On the other hand, the traditional configuration files (e.g., nova.conf) are (relatively) well-documented, have default values, and everything that's exposed is something that could potentially be changed by an administrator. In particular, there's generally a one-to-one correspondence between changing a configuration setting and changing the behavior of the system in a way that's meaningful for the operator. For example, enabling FlatDHCP in nova.conf is just setting a config option to one value:

network_manager=nova.network.manager.FlatDHCPManager


Assuming that the *-paste.ini files always need to be there, is there some way we could avoid requiring admins to edit these files, and instead make it more like editing the .conf files? For example, could the paste.ini files be generated from the corresponding .conf file as needed?


Take care,

Lorin
--
Lorin Hochstein
Lead Architect - Cloud Services
Nimbis Services, Inc.
www.nimbisservices.com





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