nova team mailing list archive

[Ewan Mellor <ewan.mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the documentation for the nova.virt layer (in nova.virt.fake) I wrote:

    An instance has an ID, which is the identifier chosen by Nova to represent
    the instance further up the stack.  This is unfortunately also called a
    'name' elsewhere.  As far as this layer is concerned, 'instance ID' and
    'instance name' are synonyms.

    Note that the instance ID or name is not human-readable or
    customer-controlled -- it's an internal ID chosen by Nova.  At the
    nova.virt layer, instances do not have human-readable names at all -- such
    things are only known higher up the stack.

Is this true any longer?  Looking at nova.db.sqlalchemy.Instance I see
fields named id, ec2_id, display_name, and display_description.  What are
the semantics of these fields?  How far are these concepts supposed to
propagate down the stack?

I go on to say:

    Some methods here take an instance of nova.compute.service.Instance.  This
    is the datastructure used by nova.compute to store details regarding an
    instance, and pass them into this layer.  This layer is responsible for
    translating that generic datastructure into terms that are specific to the
    virtualization platform.

This can't possibly be true any longer, because nova.compute.service
doesn't exist any more.  What is the appropriate replacement here?  I don't
understand why the model classes in the DB layer are part of sqlalchemy,
rather than having a model layer that's independent of the underlying DB
technology.

Thanks,

Ewan.