Add soft affinity support for server group

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/soft-affinity-for-server-group

As a tenant I would like to schedule instances on the same host if possible, so that I can achieve collocation. However if it is not possible to schedule some instance to the same host then I still want that the subsequent instances are scheduled together on another host. In this way I can express a good-to-have relationship between a group of instances.

As a tenant I would like to schedule instances on different hosts if possible. However if it is not possible I still want my instances to be scheduled even if it means that some of them are placed on a host where another instances are running from the same group.

Problem description

Use Cases

End User might want to have a less strict affinity and anti-affinity rule than what is today available in server-group API extension. With the proposed good-to-have affinity rule the End User can request nova to schedule the instance to the same host if possible. However if it is not possible (e.g. due to resource limitations) then End User still wants to keep the instances on a small amount of different host. With the proposed good-to-have anti-affinity rule the End User can request nova to spread the instances in the same group as much as possible.

Project Priority

Not a priority in kilo

Proposed change

This change would extend the existing server-group API extension with two new policies soft-affinity and soft-anti-affinity. When a instance is booted into a group with soft-affinity policy the scheduler will use a new weight AffinityWeight to sort the available hosts according to the number of instances running on them from the same server-group in a descending order. When an instance is booted into a group with soft-anti-affinity policy the scheduler will use a new weight AntiAffinityWeight to sort the available hosts according to the number of instances running on them from the same server-group in a ascending order.

The two new weights will get the necessary information about the number of instances per host through the weight_properties (filter_properties) in a similar way as the GroupAntiAffinityFilter gets the list of hosts used by a group via the filter_properties.

These new soft-affinity and soft-anti-affinity policies are mutually exclusive with each other and with the other existing server-group policies.

If the scheduler sees a request which requires any of the new weigh classes but those classes are not configured then the scheduler will reject the request with an exception similarly to the case when affinity policy is requested but ServerGroupAffinityFilter is not configured.

Alternatives

Alternatively End User can use the server-group with affinity policy and if the instance cannot be scheduled because the host associated to the group is full then End User can create a new server-group for the subsequent instances. However with large amount of instances that occupy many hosts this manual process can become quite cumbersome.

Data model impact

No schema change is needed.

There will be two new possible values soft-affinity and soft-anti-affinity for the policy column of the instance_group_policy table.

REST API impact

POST: v2/{tenant-id}/os-server-groups

The value of the policy request parameter can be soft-affinity and soft-anti-affinity as well.

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

None

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

balazs-gibizer

Work Items

  • Add two new weights to the filter scheduler. These weights will sort the available hosts by the number of instances from the same server-group.

  • Update FilterScheduler to use to reject the request if the new policy is requested but the related weigh is not configured

  • Update the server-group API extension to allow soft-affinity and soft-anti-affinity as the policy of a group.

Dependencies

None

Testing

Unit test coverage will be provided.

New tempest test case will be provided that will try to boot two servers into the same server group with soft-anti-affinity policy. The boot shall be successful even if we have only one compute host.

Documentation Impact

New weights need to be described in filter_scheduler.rst

References