openstack team mailing list archive

[Joshua Harlow <harlowja@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How are REST endpoints not reliable or scalable ;-)

I'd like to know, seeing as the web is built on them :-)

It is clearly better to access the internal API's if performance is an issue, from an abstraction point of view if the EC2 apis are a "view" on top of the OS apis then that seems to make sense (if it can be done). Although a counter-point I will accept is that if u have 2 apis that openstack supports internally, ie the EC2/OS apis this does force u to think more about the APIs that u are building (to ensure it will work with the 2 external apis), which does help force better thinking as to how your API's will be designed. When u have 2+ entrypoints using an API, then u know that 3+ will be pretty easy, but if u only have 1 entrypoint using your API, then u might just have screwed yourself.

On 4/23/12 11:01 AM, "Eric Windisch" <eric@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


 Creating a contract on the private API will allow the external APIs to be created and tested without needing a translation layer, even if contributory APIs were developed outside of the project (such as in AWSOME).

It is clearly better, architecturally, if the EC2/OCCI apis can access the internal apis directly. The RPC and database can be made to scale in Nova, but a REST endpoint won't be as reliable or scale as well.