On 05/19/2017 01:53 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
On 05/19/2017 02:34 PM, Dean Troyer wrote:
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Sean Dague <s...@dague.net> wrote:
These should be used as ways to experiment with the kinds of interfaces
we want cheaply, then take them back into services (which is a more
expensive process involving compatibility stories, deeper documentation,
performance implications, and the like), not an end game on their own.

I totally agree here.  But I also see the rate of progress for many
and varied reasons, and want to make users lives easier now.

Have any of the lessons already learned from Shade or OSC made it into
services yet?  I think a few may have, "get me a network" being the
obvious one.  But that still took a lot of work (granted that one _is_
complicated).

Doing hard things is hard. I don't expect changing APIs to be easy at
this level of deployedness of OpenStack.

You can get the behavior. It also has other behaviors. I'm not sure any
user has actually argued for "please make me do more rest calls to
create a server".

Maybe not in those words, but "give me the tools to do what I need"
has been heard often.  Sometimes those tools are composable
primitives, sometimes they are helpful opinionated interfaces.  I've
already done the helpful opinionated stuff in OSC here (accept flavor
and image names when the non-unique names _do_ identify a single
result).  Having that control lets me give the user more options in
handling edge cases.

Sure, it does. The fact that it makes 3 API calls every time when doing
flavors by name (404 on the name, list all flavors, local search, get
the flavor by real id) on mostly read only data (without any caching) is
the kind of problem that rises from "just fix it in an upper layer". So
it does provide an experience at a cost.

We also searching of all resources by name-or-id in shade. But it's one call - GET /images - and then we test to see if the given value matches the name field or the id field. And there is caching, so the list call is done once in the session.

The thing I'm the saddest about is the Nova flavor "extra_info" that one needs to grab for backwards compat but almost never has anything useful in it. This causes me to make a billion API calls for the initial flavor list (which is then cached of course) It would be WAY nicer if there was a GET /flavors/detail that would just get me the whole lot in one go, fwiw.

Dean has a harder time than I do with that one because osc interactions are lots of process invocations from scratch. We chatted a bit about how to potentially share caching things in Boston, but not sure we've come up with more.

All for new and better experiences. I think that's great. Where I think
we want to be really careful is deciding the path to creating better
experiences is by not engaging with the services and just writing around
it. That feedback has to come back. Those reasons have to come back, and
we need to roll sensible improvements back into base services.

If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

Couldn't agree more . I think we're getting better at that communication.

We still have a hole, which is that the path from "this is a problem and here's how I'm working around it" to "there are devs tasked to work on solving that problem" is a hard one, because while the communication from those of us doing client-layer stuff with the folks doing the servers is pretty good - the communication loop with the folks at the companies who are prioritizing work ... not so much. Look at the number of people hacking on shade or python-openstackclient or writing user-facing docs compared to folks adding backend features to the services.

So - yes, I totally agree. But also, we can make and are making a lot of progress in some areas with tiny crews. That's gonna likely be the state of the world for a while until we're better able to point our fingers at the problem and characterize it such that our friends who provide resources value these problems enough to fund working on them.


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