Consuming Service Types Authority¶
The OpenStack Service Types Authority is data about official service type names and historical service type names commonly in use from before there was an official list. It is made available to allow libraries and other client API consumers to be able to provide a consistent interface based on the official list but still support existing names. Providing this support is highly recommended, but is ultimately optional. The first step in the matching process is always to return direct matches between the catalog and the user request, so the existing consumption models from before the existence of the authority should always work.
In order to consume the information in the OpenStack Service Types Authority it is important to know a few things:
The data is maintained in YAML format in git. This is the ultimately authoritative source code for the list.
The data is published in JSON format at https://service-types.openstack.org/service-types.json and has a JSONSchema at https://service-types.openstack.org/published-schema.json.
The published data contains a version which is date based in ISO Date Time Format, a sha which contains the git sha of the commit the published data was built from, and pre-built forward and reverse mappings between official types and aliases.
The JSON file is served with ETag support and should be considered highly cacheable.
The current version of the JSON file should always be the preferred file to use.
The JSON file is similar to timezone data. It should not be considered versioned such that stable releases of distros should provide a frozen version of it. Distro packages should instead update for all active releases when a new version of the file is published.
