openstack team mailing list archive

[Eric Day <eday@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:20:31PM +0100, Soren Hansen wrote:
> 2011/2/16 Sandy Walsh <sandy.walsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> >> Hmmm... I am not sure about exposing internal structure to customers in this
> >> way.  Would you really want the more 'internal' zones exposed?
> > To Jay's point, the "control panel" would hide all that switching.
> 
> I agree with this. It's an API, not a UI. Doing redirects or other
> standard HTTP-y sorts of things seems perfectly reasonable to me.

If this is the case, we should be clear that we are only supporting
open, meaningful zone names. In another thread there was concern
about exposing internal zone structure and topology, and that some
deployments may want to keep it a block box. They may only want to
expose a single API endpoint, which means Nova would need to proxy
and route internally.

Another reason to not rely on redirects is efficient aggregation. If
we have a huge public cloud with hundreds of zones, and my
instances are spread across them all, I don't want to query each one
independently. It would be nice to get answers from one API. At the
same time, I realize this scale-up aggregation will not work forever,
but for our initial target numbers (10s of millions of instances)
I don't think the amount of data will be an issue.

One last thing, your comment about 'It's an API, not a UI': API's are
becoming (or already are) more important than traditional UIs these
days. Their ease of use does matter, so we should certainly consider
the UX for APIs. I want a simple, fast APIs to use with my Android
apps. :)

-Eric