Tooz Driver Policy

OpenStack project teams have identified a number of opportunities for making use of distributed lock managers and the primitives that they provide. Tooz has traditionally included a number of drivers which meet the bare minimum requirements for some of these, but are deficient in many ways.

Problem description

Given the weight that in-tree drivers will carry with users of OpenStack, there is a desire to ensure that users deploying will only be presented with choices of high quality that meet all of the requirements of the projects in OpenStack that consume tooz.

Proposed change

Drivers that are not sufficient must be deprecated and eventually removed from tooz. They will still be consumable for downstreams of tooz that do not have the same requirements of all of the OpenStack projects.

In order to identify which drivers are sufficient, a policy will be added to the documentation of tooz which provides the requirements for inclusion. This policy will be modeled on the oslo.messaging drivers policy.

Alternatives

Drivers could be classified in documentation, but kept in-tree. This would have minimum impact on tooz downstreams, but also add some risk to OpenStack deployers who might select tooz.

The API of tooz could also be changed to force callers to express their needs and allow drivers to specify their assumptions aroune the capabilities of the tooz backend in use. This would be extremely complex and make tooz harder to consume.

Impact on Existing APIs

The API will be unchanged, but the configuration options available to downstreams of tooz will be more limited.

Security impact

This will lower the surface area of tooz slightly.

Performance Impact

Some backends are deficient entirely because they are non-performant or non-scalable. So this reduces the risk of a user of OpenStack encountering performance problems.

Configuration Impact

Some backends will not be available anymore, or will cause deprecation warnings. The drivers will not be removed for several cycles after deprecation, so this is a long-term impact.

Developer Impact

Testing requirements on backends will be elevated, so developers will need to spend more effort on backends, especially on new drivers.

Testing Impact

Drivers will need to have a higher level of test coverage.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

clint-fewbar (SpamapS)

Milestones

Target Milestone for completion:

mitaka-1

Work Items

• Write policy in tooz documentation

Documentation Impact

N/A

Dependencies

N/A

References

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/mitaka-cross-project-dlm

Note

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode