api-sig/guidelines/consuming-catalog.rst

Consuming Service Catalog

This document describes the process to correctly find a service's endpoint from the Service Catalog.

Note

The process described in this document is compatible with all known OpenStack Public Clouds and also matches the behavior of the python library keystoneauth, which is the reference implementation of authenticating with keystone and consuming information from the catalog. In some places an argument can be made for a different process, but given keystoneauth's wide use and reference nature, we've chosen to keep backwards compatibility with keystoneauth's behavior rather than design a new perfect process. keystoneauth itself notes internally places where it kept backwards compatibility with the libraries that predate it. Notes have been left about stricter behavior a library or framework could choose to impose.

Note

The use of the word "object" in this document refers to a JSON object, not an Object from any particular programming language.

User Request

Note

It is worth noting that 'user' is a maleable concept. For instance, the shade library performs service discovery on behalf of its users so does not expect its users to provide a 'service-type'. In that case, shade is the 'user' of the keystoneauth library which is the discovery implementation. It is definitely not required that all consumers of OpenStack clouds know all of these things.

The ultimate goal of this process is for a user to find the information about an endpoint for a service given some inputs. The user will start the process knowing some number of these parameters. Each additional input expected from the user without an answer of "where do they learn this information" will increase the difficulty of a user consuming services, so client libraries and utilities are strongly encouraged to do whatever they can to be extra helpful in helping the user ask the right question.

Note

Be liberal with what you accept and strict with what you emit.

The following is a list of such pieces of information that can be provided as user input. When an implementation exposes the ability for a user to express these parameters it is STRONGLY recommended that these names be used, as they show up across the OpenStack ecosystem and make discussion easier.

It is assumed that the user has an {auth-url} and authentication information. The authentication process itself is out of the scope of this document.

Required Inputs

There is one piece of information that is absolutely required that the user know.

service-type

The official name of the service, such as compute, image or block-storage as listed in the OpenStack Service Types Authority <consuming-catalog/authority>. Required. It is impossible for a user to consume service discovery without knowing what service they want to discover.

Optional Filters

There are several optional pieces of information that the user might know, or additional constraints the user might wish to express to control how the endpoints for a service are selected.

region-name

The region of the service the user desires to work with. May be optional, depending on whether the cloud has more than one region. Services all exist within regions, but some clouds only have one region. If {be-strict} (see below) has been given, {region-name} is required.

Note

It is highly recommended that {region-name} always be required to protect against single-region clouds adding a region in the future. However, the canonical OpenStack implementation keystoneauth today allows region name to be omitted and there are a large number of clouds in existence with a single region named RegionOne. For completely new libraries or major versions where breaking behavior is acceptable, requiring region name by default would be preferred, but breaking users just to introduce the restriction is discouraged.

interface

Which API interface, such as public, internal or admin, that the user wants to use. A user should be able to request a list of interfaces they find acceptable in the order of their preference, such as ['internal', 'public'] (Optional, defaults to public)

endpoint-version OR min-endpoint-version, max-endpoint-version

The major version of the service the user desires to work with. Optional.

An endpoint version is inherently a range with a minimum and a maximum value. Whether it is presented to the user as a single parameter or a pair of parameters is an implementation detail.

Each endpoint version is a string with one (3) or two (3.1) numbers, separated by a dot.

Warning

Care has to be taken to not confuse major versions consisting of two numbers with microversions. Microversions usually exist within a certain major version, and also have a form of X.Y. No services currently use both major versions and microversions in the form of X.Y.

Version strings are not decimals, the are a tuple of 2 numbers combined with a dot. Therefore, 3.10 is higher than 3.9.

A user can omit the endpoint-version indicating that they want to use whatever endpoint is in the {service-catalog}.

A user can desire to work with the latest available version, in which case the {endpoint-version} should be latest. If s {min-endpoint-version} is latest, {max-endpoint-version} must be omitted or also latest.

A version can be specified with a minor value of latest to indicate the highest minor version of a given major version. For instance, 3.latest would match the highest of 3.3 and 3.4 but not 4.0.

If the parameter is presented as a single string, a single value should be interpreted as if {min-endpoint-version} is the value given and {max-endpoint-version} is MAJOR.latest. For instance, if 3.4 is given as a single value, {min-endpoint-version} is 3.4 and {max-endpoint-version} is 3.latest.

It may seem strange from an individual user perspective to want a range or latest - but from a library and framework perspective, things like shade or terraform may have internal logic that can handle more than one version of a service and want to use the best version available.

Note

Guidance around 'latest' is different from that found in the microversion specification <microversion-client-interaction>. It is acceptable for a client library or framework to be interested in the latest version available but such a specification is internal and not sent to the server. In the client case with major versions, latest acts as an input to the version discovery process.

service-name

Arbitrary name given to the service by the deployer. Optional.

Note

In all except the most extreme cases this should never be needed and its use as a meaningful identifier by Deployers is strongly discouraged. However, the Consumer has no way to otherwise mitigate the situation if their Deployer has provided them with a catalog where a service-name must be used, so service-name must be accepted as input. If {be-strict} (see below) has been requested, a user supplying {service-name} should be an error.

service-id

Unique identifier for an endpoint in the catalog. Optional.

Note

On clouds with well-formed catalogs service-id should never be needed. If {be-strict} has been requested, supplying {service-id} should be an error.

endpoint-override

An endpoint for the service that the user has procured from some other source. (Optional, defaults to omitted.)

Discovery Behavior Modifiers

The user may also wish to express alterations to the general algorithm. Implementations may present these flags under any name that makes sense, or may choose to not present them as behavioral modification options at all.

be-strict

Forgo leniant backwards compatibility concessions and be more strict in input and output validation. Defaults to False.

skip-discovery

If the user wants to completely skip the version discovery process even if logic would otherwise do it. This is useful if the user has specified an {endpoint-override} or they know they just want to use whatever is in the catalog and do not need additional metadata about the endpoint. Defaults to False

fetch-version-information

If the user has specified an {endpoint-version} which can be known to match just from looking at the URL, the version discovery process will not fetch version information documents. However, the user may need the information, such as microversion ranges. Using {fetch-version-information} allows them to request that the version document be fetched even when an optimization in the process would otherwise allow fetching the document to be skipped. Defaults to False.

Discovery Results

At the end of the discovery process, the user should know the following:

If the process was successful:

• The actual values found for all of the input values above.

  Found values will be referred to in these documents as found-{value} to differentiate. So if a user requested an {endpoint-version} of latest, {found-endpoint-version} might be 3.5.

• service-endpoint The endpoint to use as the root of the service.

• max-version If the service supports microversions, what is the maximum microversion the service supports. Optional, defaults to omitted, which implies that microversions are not supported.

• min-version If the service supports microversions, what is the minimum microversion the service supports. Optional, defaults to omitted, which implies that microversions are not supported.

If the process was unsuccessful, an error should be returned explaining which part failed. For instance, was a matching service not found at all or was a matching version not found. If a matching version was not found, the error should contain a list of version that were found.

In the description that follows, each of the above inputs and outputs will be referred to like {endpoint-override} so that it is clear whether a user supplied input to the process or one of the expected outputs is being discussed. Other values that are fetched at one point in the process and referred to at a later point are similarly referred to like {service-catalog}. Names will not be reused within the process to hold different content at different times.

Discovery Algorithm

Services should be registered in the {service-catalog} using their {service-type} from the OpenStack Service Types Authority <consuming-catalog/authority>. However, for historical reasons there are some services that have old service types found in the wild. To facilitate moving forward with the correct {service-type} names, but also support existing users and installations, the OpenStack Service Types Authority contains a list of historical aliases for such services.

Clients will need a copy of the data published in the OpenStack Service Types Authority to be able to complete the full Discovery Algorithm. A client library could either keep a local copy or fetch the data from https://service-types.openstack.org/service-types.json and potentially cache it. It is recommended that client libraries handle consumption of the historical data for their users but also allow some mechanism for the user to provide a more up to date verison of the data if necessary.

The basic process is:

1. Authenticate to keystone at the {auth-url}, retreiving a token which contains the {service-catalog}.

   Note

   This step is obviously skipped for clouds without authentication.

2. If the user has provided {endpoint-override}, it is used as {catalog-endpoint}.

3. If the user has not provided {endpoint-override}, retrieve matching {catalog-endpoint} from the {service-catalog} using the procedure explained in consuming-catalog/endpoint.

4. If {skip-discovery} is true, STOP and use {catalog-endpoint} as {service-endpoint}. Otherwise, discover the available API versions and find the suitable {service-endpoint} using the version discovery procedure from consuming-catalog/version-discovery.

5. If the requested {service-type} is an alias of an official type in the OpenStack Service Types Authority and any endpoints match the official type, find-endpoint-matching-best-service-type.

Table of Contents

consuming-catalog/endpoint consuming-catalog/version-discovery consuming-catalog/authority