Project Tree Deletion

bp project-tree-deletion

Problem Description

In the first version of Hierarchical Multitenancy (kilo-1), a project deletion was allowed only for leaf projects in the hierarchy. With this restriction, it is necessary to delete projects one by one (starting from the leafs) in order to delete a whole hierarchy branch.

For example, considering the following hierarchy:

+------------------------+
|           A            |
|                        |
|        /      \        |
|                        |
|       /        \       |
|                        |
|      B          C      |
|                        |
|    /   \       /  \    |
|                        |
|   /     \     /    \   |
|                        |
|  D       E   F      G  |
+------------------------+

To delete project B and its subtree, the user would need to first delete projects D and E.

In addition, the subtree deletion/disabling needs to be performed as an atomic operation.

Proposed Change

This spec proposes the implementation of an API to perform a whole tree deletion, which will allow the user to specify a project that is not a leaf in the hierarchy for removal. In this way, the project itself along with its whole subtree will be deleted.

In order to delete a project, it must be first disabled. Currently, this follows the same behavior as the project deletion: the user would have to manually disable the project’s children to disable a project that is in a higher level of the hierarchy (the project hierarchy doesn’t follow the same behavior as deleting domains, which has cascade effect by default). Thus, this spec also proposes changes to allow the disabling of a whole hierarchy branch within a single operation:

  • Cascade enabling/disabling of projects: once a project in a higher level of the hierarchy is disabled/enabled, all projects in its subtree are disabled/enabled. This approach follows the current rule applied in the project hierarchy, where we can’t have a disabled project with enabled children. This approach has the downside of triggering multiple writes in the database.

Both features lead to access privileges concerns: a user could have delete and update privileges for a project in a higher level of the hierarchy and not to some projects in its subtree. Although we could insist that the caller of a recursive operation has the delete_project and update_project permissions on every project, it is more likely that in practice a cloud provider will want to reserve such operations to a very restricted set up users/roles. For this reason, there is the need for new rules in the keystone policy.json file and, therefore, new API endpoints to represent these actions.

The new APIs for the delete and update requests can have the following format:

  • Delete: DELETE projects/<project_id>/cascade

  • Update: PATCH projects/<project_id>/cascade

Specifying cascade indicates that the request should also be applied to all children in the hierarchy. Note that for the update request, the enabled field is mandatory and the only accepted attribute. Including other attributes will raise an error - this results in the need of creating additional calls in keystone’s controller layer to be protected by the new rules.

With the Reseller spec, domains are projects, in this way we have the following behavior:

  • We will be able to have a hierarchy of projects that behaves as domains. Since a project acting as domain can only appear as the root of a hierarchy of regular projects (and never in the middle), the update and delete options on the hierarchy will now operate like their domain API equivalent;

  • By default we will only allow the recursive behavior to affect “pure” projects (is_domain = false). If we trigger the recursive actions on a “pure” project we are certain it will never hit a domain as per consequence of the point above. This behavior can be changed by updating the rule in keystone’s policy file.

For leaf domains, the cascade APIs have the same effect as the regular update and delete domain operations, but they will be enforced by different rules in the policy file.

Alternatives

Use a different approach for enabling/disabling:

  • Consider a whole branch as being effectively disabled once a project in a higher level of the hierarchy is disabled. By using this approach we avoid having to perform multiple writes in the database but we rely that revocation events are going to carry the information about the whole branch for token validation. In addition, when providing a token we need to check if the target has any disabled parents in the hierarchy.

Don’t add a new rule in the policy file:

  • Have a configuration where the delete and update behavior could be chosen (recursive or not). This leads to access privileges problems, an alternative could be to check if the user performing the request has access to all projects in that hierarchy branch prior to triggering the action.

Security Impact

New rules in the policy.json file to control the access to the recursive deletion and disabling of projects/domains.

Notifications Impact

A pycadf notification should be triggered for each project that is deleted or effectively disabled/enabled - they will be triggered from child to parent, this way the quota driver in other service can process the notification properly when freeing the quota to its parent project.

Other End User Impact

New behavior when deleting/disabling a project/domain along with new rules in the policy.json file.

Performance Impact

None

Other Deployer Impact

None

Developer Impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

  • Rodrigo Duarte rodrigodsousa

Other contributors:

  • Raildo Mascena raildo

  • Henrique Truta henriquetruta

Work Items

  • Update API spec documentation;

  • Add new rules to policy.json file;

  • Add new endpoints to mirror the new features;

  • Implement the new deletion/disabling behavior for the project’s hierarchy.

Dependencies

None

Documentation Impact

API Documentation (Identity API v3)

References