I saw the Python 2.5 vs 2.6 debate in the release meeting today. I don't want to weigh into that directly, but I want to propose an alternative design tenet:
It should always be possible to run Nova in a virtual appliance. As long as we stick to this as a requirement, then we don't need to worry so much about version skew between dependencies, because Nova's requirements can be isolated from the base platform. creiht is completely correct when he says that these battles can be very hard and fruitless, and we shouldn't try to fight them. For example, the XenServer domain 0 userspace still has Python 2.4, never mind 2.5. There's no way that you can say to a large cloud provider "You know that one upgrade per year that you have planned? Well you've got to make sure that the virt layer you're spending all that money on has support for all these new dependencies too." That's an impossible battle, but as long as Nova can run in virtual appliances, then we don't need to go there, and we can have whatever dependencies we want pretty much. I think that we're nearly there in this regard. libvirt can remote its calls into the virt platform, as can XenAPI. The only thing that's concerning right now is the network layer, which seems to want to do all sorts of dnsmasq and iptables things, as if it's guaranteed to be running in domain 0. That looks like it needs some rearchitecting (or a different driver, parallel with linux_net) in order to fit this model. Note that I'm not suggesting that Nova _must_ run in a virtual appliance. As I understand it, the normal deployment model for SUSE Xen or KVM would be to have a "full" control domain with all the control software in it, as opposed to the "appliance" or "disaggregated" model that we're aiming for with Xen Cloud Platform and XenServer. Does anyone object to this? Can we adopt this as a long-term design goal? Thanks, Ewan. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~nova Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~nova More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
