openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ryan, thank you for your excellent and detailed comments about problems
you encountered during the upgrade process. This is precisely the kind
of constructive feedback that is needed and desired.

Someone mentioned automated testing of upgrade paths. This is exactly
what needs to happen. Hopefully the Tempest folks can work with the CI
team in the G timeframe to incorporate upgrade path testing for the
OpenStack components. It likely won't solve ALL the issues -- such as
the poor LDAP port in Keystone Light -- but it will at least serve to
highlight where the major issues are BEFORE folks run into them. It will
also help identify those tricky things like the Glance issue below:
Glance itself upgraded its data effectively, but failed to produce
scripts to modify the Nova image database IDs at the same time.

Thanks again,
-jay

On 08/28/2012 05:26 PM, Ryan Lane wrote:
> Yesterday I spent the day finally upgrading my nova infrastructure
> from diablo to essex. I've upgraded from bexar to cactus, and cactus
> to diablo, and now diablo to essex. Every single upgrade is becoming
> more and more difficult. It's not getting easier, at all. Here's some
> of the issues I ran into:
> 
> 1. Glance changed from using image numbers to uuids for images. Nova's
> reference to these weren't updated. There was no automated way to do
> so. I had to map the old values to the new values from glance's
> database then update them in nova.
> The mention of testing upgrade paths go
> 2. Instance hostnames are changed every single release. In bexar and
> cactus it was the ec2 style id. In diablo it was changed and hardcoded
> to instance-<ec2-style-id>. In essex it is hardcoded to the instance
> name; the instance's ID is configurable (with a default of
> instance-<ec2-style-id>, but it only affects the name used in
> virsh/the filesystem. I put a hack into diablo (thanks to Vish for
> that hack) to fix the naming convention as to not break our production
> deployment, but it only affected the hostnames in the database,
> instances in virsh and on the filesystem were still named
> instance-<ec2-style-id>, so I had to fix all libvirt definitions and
> rename a ton of files to fix this during this upgrade, since our
> naming convention is the ec2-style format. The hostname change still
> affected our deployment, though. It's hardcoded. I decided to simply
> switch hostnames to the instance name in production, since our
> hostnames are required to be unique globally; however, that changes
> how our puppet infrastructure works too, since the certname is by
> default based on fqdn (I changed this to use the ec2-style id). Small
> changes like this have giant rippling effects in infrastructures.
> 
> 3. There used to be global groups in nova. In keystone there are no
> global groups. This makes performing actions on sets of instances
> across tenants incredibly difficult; for instance, I did an in-place
> ubuntu upgrade from lucid to precise on a compute node, and needed to
> reboot all instances on that host. There's no way to do that without
> database queries fed into a custom script. Also, I have to have a
> management user added to every single tenant and every single
> tenant-role.
> 
> 4. Keystone's LDAP implementation in stable was broken. It returned no
> roles, many values were hardcoded, etc. The LDAP implementation in
> nova worked, and it looks like its code was simply ignored when auth
> was moved into keystone.
> 
> My plea is for the developers to think about how their changes are
> going to affect production deployments when upgrade time comes.
> 
> It's fine that glance changed its id structure, but the upgrade should
> have handled that. If a user needs to go into the database in their
> deployment to fix your change, it's broken.
> 
> The constant hardcoded hostname changes are totally unacceptable; if
> you change something like this it *must* be configurable, and there
> should be a warning that the default is changing.
> 
> The removal of global groups was a major usability killer for users.
> The removal of the global groups wasn't necessarily the problem,
> though. The problem is that there were no alternative management
> methods added. There's currently no reasonable way to manage the
> infrastructure.
> 
> I understand that bugs will crop up when a stable branch is released,
> but the LDAP implementation in keystone was missing basic
> functionality. Keystone simply doesn't work without roles. I believe
> this was likely due to the fact that the LDAP backend has basically no
> tests and that Keystone light was rushed in for this release. It's
> imperative that new required services at least handle the
> functionality they are replacing, when released.
> 
> That said, excluding the above issues, my upgrade went fairly smoothly
> and this release is *way* more stable and performs *way* better, so
> kudos to the community for that. Keep up the good work!
> 
> - Ryan
> 
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