We discussed the policy on third party apis this week at the PPB meeting. We
decided to take it to the mailing list for discussion so we can get to some
reasonable things to vote on in next weeks meeting.
tl; dr
How do third party apis fit in OpenStack?
Background
This was inspired by the current proposals for OCCI and CDMI into nova and
swift and the upcoming work and proposals for CIMI for nova. The basic question
is: does this code belong in the core repositories and if not, where does it
go. I see a number of groups with interest in this. I'm going to outline the
major players and give my (biased) opinion on what they want
a) Core Developers: would prefer to have these apis outside of core. It is
already a burden to maintain the existing apis, so separating these into
separate projects would be beneficial.
b) Standards Bodies/Developers: would prefer to have some
recognition/discoverability for the new apis, currently the only path forward
is to be in core, so they are pushing to be included, but they might be ok with
some other type of recognition.
c) Deployers/Distributors: want an easy way to know that these external plugins
work well. This can be accomplished by testing/etc. Probably don't really care
too much about the new apis unless they get specific customer requests
d) Users: some users (scientific community) would love to have access to these
other apis. From a user perspective, the more apis the better, as long as they
are stable and all work.
Current Proposals
a) ppb doesn't care and the projects decide individually
b) third party apis are not part of openstack core, and we focus on building a
strong ecosystem where these apis could exist as proxies or external plugins.
It is up to deployers to decide which ecosystem projects to include in their
distributions
c) just like b, but there is additionally a process by which these third party
tools could become 'official' in some sense or be 'recommended' for inclusion
by the distros.
d) third party standards are vetted for inclusion by the ppb and are added to
core projects assuming they can pass certain testing requirements
e) we have our own api, so we shouldn't be encouraging 3rd party apis at all.
Tney are on their own.
f) ???
Please discuss,
Vish
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