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Re: Feedback on Portable Configuration Drive Blueprint

 

Hi Thorsten,

pvo and I have put together some rough answers to your questions at:
http://etherpad.openstack.org/clouddrive

To answer your questions in short though; the rough idea for the clouddrive
is a small ~64MB ISO formatted volume that would be attached and mounted
read-only by the guest instance on boot. All injected-files (re:
xs-inject-files), base metadata (IP addresses, passwords, etc), and custom
metadata would be written into that volume on instance creation. Updates
would be possible in the same manner that injected files can be updated, but
would basically require the whole drive be detached and rewritten.

Thanks,
Christopher

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Paul Voccio <paul.voccio@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Thorsten,
>
> I'll take a run at these since I wrote the blueprint. It was initially
> more of a placeholder that was going to get filled out later but Vish
> bumped the priority before we (Ozone) was ready to move forward. I haven't
> talked to Chris in regards to his implementation and I haven't seen the
> code yet. I'll take a look at the code and update the blueprint later
> tonight/tomorrow.
>
> pvo
>
> On 6/17/11 7:03 PM, "Thorsten von Eicken" <tve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >We're very much looking forward to the new "portable configuration
> >drive" functionality and would like to provide feedback. If this is not
> >the best forum, please point me to it.
> >
> >The blueprint
> >is: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/configuration-drive
> >We reviewed the initial work
> >in:
> >
> https://github.com/ChristopherMacGown/nova/commit/47c041a642ff32085b314047
> >5d7a2a62dcb62c1a
> >
> >Feedback:
> >
> >1. It is not always obvious how to enumerate attached devices and the
> >document doesn't explicitly cover how we'd determine which attached
> >device represents the configuration volume. Specifically consider
> >Windows as well.
> >
> >2. Will the configuration drive be available at boot time on a new
> >instance? Or does it appear "later" (that would be bad)?
>
> >
> >3. How does one send the configuration drive content?  What is the API
> >call where we provide the configuration information and what is the
> >expected format?
>
>
>
> >
> >4. It looks like the configuration content is placed into a config.json
> >file, is this correct? Is that a blob passed through the API? Does it
> >have to be json or is that just a convention? What is the max size?
> >
> >5. What are the permissions required to access the configuration drive?
> >Would be ideal for the content to be root/administrator accessible only
> >(because it may contain credentials). Can this be influenced via the API?
> >
> >6. Is this device going to be read-only?
> >
> >7. We need to be able to change the configuration content when
> >stopping&starting instances, will this be possible?
> >
> >8. There is a related spec: 'instance-transport'. Is that still
> >relevant? Or superseded by the configuration drive?
> >
> >9. Will the configuration drive contain any metadata? E.g. IP addresses,
> >names of available volumes, instance ID, etc.
> >
> >Thanks much!
> >Thorsten - CTO RightScale
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Christopher MacGown
Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.
(415) 300-0944
chris@xxxxxxxxx

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