nova team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Have we considered using UUID or some sort of URI as the unique
identifier for instances (and other objects in the system)?  Seems to
me that the existing methods (str_id and similar) are trying to
reinvent the primary key wheel somewhat for each API namespace.  Why
not use UUID or URI and be done with it?  In other words, completely
scrap the idea of using auto-incrementing keys...

-jay

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:52 AM, Michael Gundlach
<michael.gundlach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Ewan,
> On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Ewan Mellor <ewan.mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 02, 2010 at 03:29:57PM +0100, Ewan Mellor wrote:
>>
>> > 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?
>
> id is the primary key in sqlalchemy -- not stable if we move b/w databases
> or shard, so not a candidate for uniquely identifying the instance for all
> time.
> ec2_id USED TO be the string that the EC2 API used to identify the instance
> to the user.
> ec2_id is being renamed (in a branch that hasn't hit trunk yet) to
> 'internal_id' and becoming a long int.  That is the canonical identifier for
> an instance, unique for all time and unchanging throughout the life of the
> instance.
> The EC2 and Rackspace API modules convert 'internal_id' to and from an
> API-specific form suitable for showing to users -- in the EC2 case, it's
> converted to
>   "i-%s" % base_36_representation_of(internal_id)
> I've seen some code referring to 'ec2_id' as 'instance_id' (in method params
> and such), which is just confusing; I'll be renaming those to internal_id
> for consistency before Austin.
> I don't know what display_name and display_description are about.
> Michael
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