openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/04/2012 06:20 PM, Steve Baker wrote:
<snip>

> To fix this semantic clash I would advocate adopting Amazon's Tags
> terminology but I won't be pushing this too hard since I'm new here ;)

<rant>

I've been saying this for years now. Metadata is absolutely used
incorrectly in the Compute and Images APIs. Metadata is data *about*
data. For example, the length of a string is metadata. The contents of
the string is the data. The length is data about that data.

</rant>

Tags are a more appropriate term for strings attached to a resource. I
still don't particularly understand the incessant need for key/value
pairs, frankly. There's nothing that searching an "architecture" key for
the value "x86_64" gets you over searching a tags collection for
"x86_64" other than perhaps easier aggregation and grouping on a key.
But for this kind of stuff, I just don't see the point of the
more-complicated key/value pairs over a collection of string tags.

Best,
-jay