[occi-wg] Fwd: [Openstack] 3rd Party APIs

FYI - please feel free to join the Openstack list (and the openstack-dev list if that gets going) and contribute your knowledge and implementations as suggested and requested below. Alan Begin forwarded message:

From: Mark McLoughlin Subject: Re: [Openstack] 3rd Party APIs Date: May 8, 2012 9:58:45 AM CDT To: "openstack@lists.launchpad.net" Cc: "openstack-poc@lists.launchpad.net" Reply-To: Mark McLoughlin

Hey,

I just realised there's a thread on the openstack-poc list about how OpenStack should view implementations of APIs other than the OpenStack API:

https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack-poc/msg00448.html

(PPB members - please note that other folks can't subscribe to the POC list. If you want an open discussion on something, the openstack-poc list isn't the place for it)

tl;dr - rather than actively discouraging folks from contributing native API implementations, encourage them to resolve the current difficulties with the EC2 API and their work as a test case for feature/subsystem branch development process.

The discussion is fairly complex and seems to degenerate into an overly general "what is and is not core" discussion. There also seems to be a sense of urgency around finding a final solution here, which I don't fully understand. The truth is we don't know the answer. We just need to have some rough idea of what we're trying to achieve and figure out the thing we want to try next. We'll likely have to try a bunch of stuff before finding one that works.

What I'd like to see us get to is:

Deep overlap between the OpenStack developer community and the community of folks drafting whatever IaaS standard(s) wind up being dominant.

e.g. prominent, active Nova developers developers contributing to the CIMI or OCCI standards and bringing the needs of OpenStack to the standard and bringing ideas from the standards process to OpenStack.

This isn't a question of asking existing OpenStack developers to join these standards bodies. It's about enabling members of those standards bodies to become as much a part of OpenStack as any other developer.

How to do that? Encourage members the various standards communities to actively contribute an implementation of their standard to OpenStack and, more importantly, stick around to become an ongoing active member of the OpenStack developer community.

If this worked out, OpenStack would gain new developers, new ideas and would be seen as the best place to do new work around IaaS APIs.

AFAICT nova-core has two major concerns with the EC2 API - 1) currently having to make a change once in the OpenStack API and again in the EC2 API and 2) the EC2 isn't maintenance isn't sufficiently active.

I think a lot of the urgency around this discussion is wanting to avoid exacerbating the situation by adding another API. To me, the answer is fairly simple. We cannot accept a new API until these concerns are addressed:

1) The amount of duplication between the OpenStack, EC2 and any proposed API needs to be significantly reduced

2) The developers of any proposed new API need to demonstrate a commitment (through their work) to sticking around as active OpenStack developers maintaining the API (perhaps as a subsystem tree)

That's a high bar, and I expect only seriously committed contributors would meet it. In the meantime, those contributors can work on their APIs as feature branches and encourage others to give feedback.

Two alternatives to the above are on the table. Firstly, implementing these APIs as deltacloud-like proxy servers and blessing these as "official" OpenStack products. IMHO, proxies are architecturally less than ideal. Perhaps with enough engineering effort (including OpenStack API additions) we can get to where they are almost on-par with a native API, but I'm sceptical.

The other option is to support these APIs with external plugins. For us to get there, we need a stable library-like API that these plugins can depend on. It's potentially an ideal solution, but I think we've a long way to get there. A stepping stone is the re-factoring to reduce duplication between APIs.

Cheers, Mark.

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