That looks like a decent alternative if it works. However, it would be too racy 
unless we we implement a test-and-set for such properties or there is a 
different job which queues up these requests and perform sequentially for each 
tenant.

Thanks,
-Nikhil
________________________________
From: Chris St. Pierre [chris.a.st.pie...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2014 10:23 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [glance] Option to skip deleting images in use?

That's unfortunately too simple. You run into one of two cases:

1. If the job automatically removes the protected attribute when an image is no 
longer in use, then you lose the ability to use "protected" on images that are 
not in use. I.e., there's no way to say, "nothing is currently using this 
image, but please keep it around." (This seems particularly useful for 
snapshots, for instance.)

2. If the job does not automatically remove the protected attribute, then an 
image would be protected if it had ever been in use; to delete an image, you'd 
have to manually un-protect it, which is a workflow that quite explicitly 
defeats the whole purpose of flagging images as protected when they're in use.

It seems like flagging an image as *not* in use is actually a fairly difficult 
problem, since it requires consensus among all components that might be using 
images.

The only solution that readily occurs to me would be to add something like a 
filesystem link count to images in Glance. Then when Nova spawns an instance, 
it increments the usage count; when the instance is destroyed, the usage count 
is decremented. And similarly with other components that use images. An image 
could only be deleted when its usage count was zero.

There are ample opportunities to get out of sync there, but it's at least a 
sketch of something that might work, and isn't *too* horribly hackish. Thoughts?

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Vishvananda Ishaya 
<vishvana...@gmail.com<mailto:vishvana...@gmail.com>> wrote:
A simple solution that wouldn’t require modification of glance would be a cron 
job
that lists images and snapshots and marks them protected while they are in use.

Vish

On Dec 16, 2014, at 3:19 PM, Collins, Sean 
<sean_colli...@cable.comcast.com<mailto:sean_colli...@cable.comcast.com>> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 05:12:31PM EST, Chris St. Pierre wrote:
>> No, I'm looking to prevent images that are in use from being deleted. "In
>> use" and "protected" are disjoint sets.
>
> I have seen multiple cases of images (and snapshots) being deleted while
> still in use in Nova, which leads to some very, shall we say,
> interesting bugs and support problems.
>
> I do think that we should try and determine a way forward on this, they
> are indeed disjoint sets. Setting an image as protected is a proactive
> measure, we should try and figure out a way to keep tenants from
> shooting themselves in the foot if possible.
>
> --
> Sean M. Collins
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> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org<mailto:OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org>
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev


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