Add Possibility for Cascade Deletion of Neutron Networks

https://bugs.launchpad.net/neutron/+bug/1870319

When creating a network, a user needs to create other resources such as subnets and ports depending on their needs. They would need to make numerous API calls to the Neutron server to achieve this, and that’s okay. Deleting the network doesn’t need to be that much of a hassle, though. This spec explores a way to extend the delete API command to include an argument to cascade delete all corresponding ports and subports upon the deletion of a network.

Problem Description

Currently, deleting a network with many ports requires many API calls to the Neutron server as the user needs to list all ports and delete them before requesting the deletion of the network itself. Even more requests are required when the network is plugged to a router(s) or has trunk ports as those also need to be removed before network can be deleted. A simple openstack network delete <network name or ID> as prescribed in the OpenStackClient (OSC) to delete a given network does not work if there is one or more ports still in use on the network. In other cases, e.g. when Kuryr [1] is used, it puts a lot of load on Neutron’s client-side. This is what Kuryr currently needs to do to delete “namespace”:

  • Get the ACTIVE ports in the subnet.

  • Get the trunks.

  • For each ACTIVE port, obtain what trunk it is attached to and call Neutron to detach it.

  • Remove the ports (one by one; there is no bulk deletion).

  • Get the DOWN ports in the given subnet.

  • Remove the ports (one by one; there is no bulk deletion).

  • Detach the subnet from the router.

  • Remove the network (which will also remove the subnet).

Proposed Change

The goal of this spec is to add a new API to allow for the cascade deletion of a given network and all the resources that belong to that network, similarly to Octavia’s loadbalancer delete --cascade option [2]. When the proposed network cascade deletion API call is sent to the Neutron server, it is expected to find and clean:

  • All router interfaces that belong to the subnets in that network,

  • All trunk ports whose parent ports are in that network. It will also need to find and delete all the subports in these trunks,

  • Remove all ports in that network, this includes especially ports owned by nova compute, attached to VMs; ports owned by DEVICE_OWNER_DHCP, DEVICE_OWNER_DISTRIBUTED or DEVICE_OWNER_AGENT_GW can be omitted as they will have been already automatically removed.

After all this cleaning is done, the network will be finally deleted.

REST API Impact

The new option will be added to the DELETE /v2.0/networks/{network_id} API [3].

The new option will be called cascade, and will be a boolean value.

If this new option is set to True, Neutron will remove all the resources that need to be cleaned to successfully remove the given network.

The main concern regarding the proposed API is the return code in case the deletion of some resources fails and thus the request is only partially completed. There are a few possible options in such a case:

  1. Return HTTP 207 Multi-status [4] and in the response body, return a list of actions on various resources and their statuses, for example:

    {
    "data": [
        {
            "message": "Success",
            "resource": {
                "name": "port",
                "id": "40ac1143-1488-42df-bf85-b0fde7598c97"
            },
            "status": 200
        },
        {
            "message": "Forbidden",
            "resource": {
                "name": "trunk",
                "id": "cb4acbfa-190a-4ad2-9227-ea8595b59b19",
            },
            "status": 403
        },
        {
            "message": "Network in use.",
            "resource": {
                "name": "network",
                "id": "a7ebad6d-fd63-4024-b7db-8c30f5f9dea3"
            },
            "status": 409
        }
    ]
}

    In this case, Neutron can always stop on first failure, so the response body will always contain only one or two resources which failed during the request: the network and one of the other resources that had to be cleaned in cascade but, for some reason, failed.

  2. Stop processing the cascade request on first failure and always return HTTP 409 Conflict with detailed information about what went wrong, e.g. “Port <port_id> could not be deleted. Reason: <message>”.

  3. Make this Neutron API asynchronous. In this case, the return code would only tell if the cascade delete request was accepted and will be processed by the server, or not. Later, the user would be able to periodically check if the network is already deleted or not yet. This is how Octavia implemented the cascade deletion of the loadbalancer [2]. But it would break the documented Neutron API behaviour [4].

The proposal of this spec is to implement third solution from the ones mentioned above and make this Neutron API asynchronous.

Data Model Impact

Network’s status field will have new possible value DELETING which will indicate that network is in the middle of the asynchronous deletion.

To avoid execution of several DB transactions at once, e.g. when one worker will proceed with asynchronous cascade deletion of the network and all its resources and other one would try to update one of the ports/subnets it will be needed to add check of the network’s status for all CREATE/UPDATE/DELETE operations for ports and subnets as well as for attach/detach subnets from the routers.

Security Impact

None

Performance Impact

Finding and removing all the resources to be cascade deleted will be slow, so the cascade deletion of a network with many resources may take a long time. To minimize that time, we can think of a couple of optimizations like:

  • Implementing bulk port deletion,

  • Removing a port from a trunk automatically if it is the trunk’s subport.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignees:

Sharon Koech <skoech@protonmail.ch> (IRC: skoech)

Work Items

  • REST API update.

  • ML2 plugin update.

  • CLI update.

  • Documentation.

  • Tests and CI related changes.

Testing

  • Unit Tests.

  • API tests.

Documentation Impact

User Documentation

The new API option must be documented in the Neutron api-ref document.

References