Flavor description

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/flavor-description

Expose a description field on the flavor resource so that operators can describe a flavor in terms that a user can understand without relying on verbose names or users needing to understand extra specs.

Problem description

Administrators are only able to describe flavors via the name and id fields and generally one would like to avoid putting too much detail in those types of fields, especially for things like flavor extra specs that define the behavior of an instance created with that flavor, for example, baremetal nodes, or host aggregates for different hypervisors in a multi-hypervisor deployment.

Use Cases

As an administrator, I want to provide simple names for my flavors but describe in some detail what is special about each flavor, especially if it has extra specs or certain limitations.

Proposed change

This is fairly straight-forward and just involves modifying the flavors APIs to allow specifying a description field when creating or updating a flavor and returning the description when showing flavor details.

Microversion 2.47 changed how the embedded flavor in a server response body looks by showing the full flavor details rather than just an id/link. Despite this change, we will not include the embedded flavor description in the server response body.

Alternatives

Use the name or id fields, which are both strings, but as noted in the problem description this can get messy.

Data model impact

A new nullable description TEXT column will be added to the flavors table in the API database with a maximum length of 65535.

Since we will not index or filter on this field, making it a TEXT (65536 bytes) versus TINYTEXT (256 bytes) field is not really a concern.

Note

We store a serialized version of the flavor associated with an instance record in the instance_extras table and that is a TEXT column. Since we are not going to expose the embedded instance flavor description in the API, we will trim the flavor description from the serialized version stored in the instance_extras table.

REST API impact

All of the following changes would happen within a new microversion.

  • POST /flavors

    Allow a description field in the request and response when creating a flavor.

    The schema would be the same as the description field in the 2.19 microversion for POST /servers except the maxLength will be 65535.

    The samples below are not particularly interesting since the real value in a description field is in describing behaviors or limitations of a flavor which is more important when it has extra specs tied to host aggregates, which happens after the flavor is initially created.

    Request sample:

    {
  "flavor": {
      "name": "2vcpu-1024ram-10disk-baremetal-10gb",
      "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card.",
      "ram": 1024,
      "vcpus": 2,
      "disk": 10,
      "id": "f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f"
  }
}

    Response sample:

    {
  "flavor": {
      "OS-FLV-DISABLED:disabled": false,
      "disk": 10,
      "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 0,
      "os-flavor-access:is_public": true,
      "id": "f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
      "links": [
          {
              "href": "http://openstack.example.com/v2/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
              "rel": "self"
          },
          {
              "href": "http://openstack.example.com/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
              "rel": "bookmark"
          }
      ],
      "name": "2vcpu-1024ram-10disk-baremetal-10gb",
      "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card.",
      "ram": 1024,
      "swap": "",
      "rxtx_factor": 1.0,
      "vcpus": 2
  }
}

  • GET /flavors, GET /flavors/detail and GET /flavors/{flavor_id}

    Add a required description field in the response when getting flavor details. If the flavor does not have a description, None will be returned.

    GET /flavors response sample:

    {
   "flavors": [
       {
          "id": "f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
          "links": [
              {
                  "href": "http://openstack.example.com/v2/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
                  "rel": "self"
              },
              {
                  "href": "http://openstack.example.com/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
                  "rel": "bookmark"
              }
          ],
          "name": "2vcpu-1024ram-10disk-baremetal-10gb",
          "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card."
       }
   ]
 }

    GET /flavors/detail response sample:

    {
  "flavors": [
      {
         "OS-FLV-DISABLED:disabled": false,
         "disk": 10,
         "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 0,
         "os-flavor-access:is_public": true,
         "id": "f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
         "links": [
             {
                 "href": "http://openstack.example.com/v2/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
                 "rel": "self"
             },
             {
                 "href": "http://openstack.example.com/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
                 "rel": "bookmark"
             }
         ],
         "name": "2vcpu-1024ram-10disk-baremetal-10gb",
         "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card.",
         "ram": 1024,
         "swap": "",
         "rxtx_factor": 1.0,
         "vcpus": 2
      }
  ]
}

    GET /flavors/{flavor_id} response sample:

    {
  "flavor": {
      "OS-FLV-DISABLED:disabled": false,
      "disk": 10,
      "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 0,
      "os-flavor-access:is_public": true,
      "id": "f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
      "links": [
          {
              "href": "http://openstack.example.com/v2/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
              "rel": "self"
          },
          {
              "href": "http://openstack.example.com/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
              "rel": "bookmark"
          }
      ],
      "name": "2vcpu-1024ram-10disk-baremetal-10gb",
      "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card.",
      "ram": 1024,
      "swap": "",
      "rxtx_factor": 1.0,
      "vcpus": 2
  }
}

  • PUT /flavors/{flavor_id}

    Add a PUT API for updating the flavor description field. This is useful for existing flavors, and for new flavors since one has to add extra specs to a flavor after it is initially created, which might affect the ultimate description. Also, flavor extra specs could change which might affect the scheduling behavior with host aggregates, so in that case the description may need to be updated also.

    The description field will be required in the request and the response.

    Note

    The only field that can be updated is the description field. Nova has historically intentionally not included an API to update a flavor because that would be confusing for instances already created with that flavor. Needing to change any other aspect of a flavor requires deleting and/or creating a new flavor.

    Request sample:

    {
  "flavor": {
      "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card."
  }
}

    Response sample:

    {
  "flavor": {
      "OS-FLV-DISABLED:disabled": false,
      "disk": 10,
      "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 0,
      "os-flavor-access:is_public": true,
      "id": "f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
      "links": [
          {
              "href": "http://openstack.example.com/v2/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
              "rel": "self"
          },
          {
              "href": "http://openstack.example.com/6f70656e737461636b20342065766572/flavors/f68c1474-4ba6-4291-bbdc-2c7865c0f33f",
              "rel": "bookmark"
          }
      ],
      "name": "2vcpu-1024ram-10disk-baremetal-10gb",
      "description": "Baremetal flavor with 10GB network card.",
      "ram": 1024,
      "swap": "",
      "rxtx_factor": 1.0,
      "vcpus": 2
  }
}

Security impact

A new policy rule for the PUT /flavors/{flavor_id} API will be added and default to admin-only.

Administrators will want to keep any details about a flavor at a high enough level to abstract low-level details about their deployment or topology so as to not leak host aggregate details, but this is nothing new.

Notifications impact

The flavor.create, flavor.update and flavor.delete versioned notifications will be updated to include the new nullable description field.

Other end user impact

The python-novaclient CLI and API bindings will be updated to allow creating, updating and showing flavor details with a description field.

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

None

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

Matt Riedemann <mriedem.os@gmail.com>

Work Items

  • Update API DB schema to add the nullable TEXT description column to the flavors table.

  • Add a description field to the Flavor versioned object and ensure it is not serialized and stored in the instance_extras.flavor column.

  • Add a microversion to the REST API to create, update and show flavors with a description.

  • CLI and API binding changes to python-novaclient.

Dependencies

None

Testing

  • Unit tests for negative scenarios:

    • Create a flavor with a description before the new microversion.

    • Create/update a flavor with a description that is too large.

    • Update a flavor without specifying a description.

    • Try to update a flavor description before the new microversion.

    • Create a flavor with a description of length 65535 and use it to create an instance and ensure the embedded instance.flavor does not contain the description in the instance_extras table.

    • Create a flavor with a description, create a server with the flavor, get the server details out of the API and ensure the flavor description is not included in the server response body.

  • Functional API samples tests for the new microversion.

Documentation Impact

The compute REST API reference would be updated for the new microversion.

The flavors admin guide would also be updated.

References

Queens PTG discussion: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/nova-ptg-queens

History

Revisions

Release Name

Description

Queens

Introduced