On 08/13/2012 09:12 AM, Dan Prince wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Michael Still" <michael.st...@canonical.com> >> To: openstack@lists.launchpad.net, openstack-operat...@lists.openstack.org >> Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2012 5:12:22 AM >> Subject: [Openstack] [Nova] How common is user_data for instances? >> >> Greetings. >> >> I'm seeking information about how common user_data is for instances >> in >> nova. Specifically for large deployments (rackspace and HP, here's >> looking at you). What sort of costs would be associated with changing >> the data type of the user_data column in the nova database? >> >> Bug 1035055 [1] requests that we allow user_data of more than 65,535 >> bytes per instance. Note that this size is a base64 encoded version >> of >> the data, so that's only a bit under 50k of data. This is because the >> data is a sqlalchemy Text column. >> >> We could convert to a LongText column, which allows 2^32 worth of >> data, >> but I want to understand the cost to operators of that change some >> more. >> Is user_data really common? Do you think people would start uploading >> much bigger user_data? Do you care? > > Nova has configurable quotas on most things so if we do increase the size of > the DB column we should probably guard it in a configurable manner with > quotas as well. > > My preference would actually be that we go the other way though and not have > to store user_data in the database at all. That unfortunately may not be > possible since some images obtain user_data via the metadata service which > needs a way to look it up. Other methods of injecting metadata via disk > injection, agents and/or config drive however might not need it to be store > in the database right?
+1 When we can, let's not hobble ourselves to the EC2 API way of doing things when we can have a more efficient and innovative solution. > As a simpler solution: > > Would setting a reasonable limit (hopefully smaller) and returning a HTTP 400 > bad request if incoming requests exceed that limit be good enough to resolve > this ticket? That way we don't have to increase the DB column at all and end > users would be notified up front that user_data is too large (not silently > truncated). They way I see it user_data is really for bootstrapping > instances... we probably don't need it to be large enough to write an entire > application, etc. Seems reasonable to me. -jay >> >> Mikal >> >> 1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1035055 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack >> Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net >> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack >> More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp >> > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack > Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp