Hi all,

Nova currently allows us to filter instances by fixed IP address(es). This 
feature is known to be useful in an operational scenario that cloud 
administrators detect abnormal traffic in an IP address and want to trace down 
to the instance that this IP address belongs to. This feature works well except 
a limitation that it only supports fixed IP address(es). In the real 
operational scenarios, cloud administrators might find that the abused IP 
address is a floating IP and want to do the filtering in the same way as fixed 
IP.

Right now, unfortunately, the experience is diverged between these two classes 
of IP address. Cloud administrators need to deploy the logic to (i) detect the 
class of IP address (fixed or floating), (ii) use nova's IP filter if the 
address is a fixed IP address, (iii) do manual filtering if the address is a 
floating IP address. I wonder if nova team is willing to accept an enhancement 
that makes the IP filter support both. Optimally, cloud administrators can 
simply pass the abused IP address to nova and nova will handle the 
heterogeneity.

In term of implementation, I expect the change is small. After this patch [1], 
Nova will query Neutron to compile a list of ports' device_ids (device_id is 
equal to the uuid of the instance to which the port binds) and use the 
device_ids to query the instances. If Neutron returns an empty list, Nova can 
give a second try to query Neutron for floating IPs. There is a RFE [2] and POC 
[3] for proposing to add a device_id attribute to the floating IP API resource. 
Nova can leverage this attribute to compile a list of instances uuids and use 
it as filter on listing the instances.

If this feature is implemented, will it benefit the general community? Finally, 
I also wonder how others are tackling a similar problem. Appreciate your 
feedback.

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/525505/
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/neutron/+bug/1723026
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/534882/

Best regards,
Hongbin
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