Design decisions

This document captures outcomes and, in some cases, the through process behind some of the design decisions that took place while architecting CloudBridge. It is intended as a reference.

Require zone parameter when creating a default subnet

Placement zone is required because it is an explicit application decision, even though ideally default would not require input. Before requiring it, the implementations would create a subnet in each availability zone and return the first one in the list. This could potentially return different values over time. Another factor influencing the decision was the example of creating a volume followed by creating an instance with presumably the two needing to be in the same zone. By requiring the zone across the board, it is less likely to lead to a miss match. (Related to 63.)

Resource identification, naming, and labeling

While it would be reasonable to expect that complex constructs like networking would be the most difficult to abstract away uniformly across providers, in retrospect, simple naming of objects has arguably been the most complex and convoluted to map consistently. CloudBridge has been through several iterations of naming and labeling, before finally settling on the current design. This section captures that history and design rationale.

First iteration In the early days, when CloudBridge supported only AWS and OpenStack, there were only two concepts, id and name. The id was straightforward enough, as it usually mapped to a unique identifier, auto-generated by the provider. The name generally mapped to a tag in the case of AWS, and a name field in the case of OpenStack. However, even then, there were inconsistencies within individual providers. For example, while AWS generally supported tags, it had a dedicated name field for machine images called ami-name. Furthermore, this name field could only be set at image creation time, and could not be changed thereafter. Similarly, AWS does not allow VM firewall (i.e., security group) names to be changed. Nevertheless, CloudBridge continued to use id and name, with the name being changeable for some resources, and read-only in others.

As CloudBridge evolved and support was added for Azure and GCE, things only became more complex. Some providers (e.g. Azure and GCE) used a user-provided value instead of an auto-generated value as an id, which would also be displayed in their respective dashboards as Name. This meant that they were treating their servers as individually named pets, instead of adopting the cattle model, should one be tempted to use that macabre pets vs cattle analogy. These user-provided names could not be changed after a resource had been created. Instead, these providers seemed to be gravitating toward the use of tags (or labels) to support arbitrary naming and name changes. Yet, not all resources support tags so CloudBridge could not rely solely on tags. Further, tags do not need to be unique across multiple resources, while names do (at least for some resources, such as vmfirewalls within a private network). Overall, consistency was challenging to achieve with resource naming. Therefore, it was decided that CloudBridge would continue to support resource renaming to the best extent possible and balance between the use of the resource name property and resource tags. However, because of the inconsistency in rename functionality across providers, using the rename capabilities within CloudBridge would lead to cloud-dependent code (Related to 131.) and therefore, the only option was to continue to stick a caveat emptor to resource renaming.

Second iteration However, it soon became apparent that this overloaded terminology was continuing to cause confusion. The id property in CloudBridge mapped to the unchangeable name property in Azure and GCE, and the name property in cloudbridge sometimes mapped to a tag in certain providers, and a name in other providers and they were sometimes read-only, sometimes writable. In an attempt to disambiguate these concepts, it was then decided that perhaps three concepts were needed - id, display_id, and label. The id would continue to refer to a unique identifier for a resource and be mapped accordingly to the underlying provider. The display_id would be a more user-friendly version of an id, suitable for display to an end-user and be unchangeable, but on rare occasions, not unique. For example, AWS ami-name was a display_id while the ami-id was an id. Similarly, an Azure resource name mapped to the display_id, since it was an unchangeable, user-friendly identifier. Finally, label was a changeable, user-assignable value that would be mapped often to a tag on the resource, or the name of the resource, should the name be changeable. This clearly disambiguated between unique identifiers, user-assignable values and read-only, user-friendly values. At object creation, all services would accept a label as an optional parameter. If provided, the display_id would sometimes be derived from the label by appending a uuid to the label, depending on the provider. At other times, it would simply map to an id.

Third iteration It soon became apparent that some resources like keypairs could not have a label at all, yet needed to be named during object creation. However, we could not use display_id for this purpose became the display_id, by definition, is unchangeable. It could not be called label because the label, in contrast, was changeable. Therefore, it seemed like we were back to calling it name instead, introducing yet a fourth term. To simplify this, it was then decided that display_id and name would be collapsed together into one term and be called name instead. All resources would have an id and a name, and resources that support it would have a label. To make things even simpler and consistent, it was also decided that label would be made mandatory for all resources during object creation, and follow the same restrictions as name, which is to have a 3 character minimum. (This was to deal with an exception in OpenStack, where the label mapped to instance name, but could not be empty. Therefore, by making all labels mandatory and adhere to minimum length restrictions, we could make the overall conventions uniform across all resources and therefore easier to remember and enforce.)

TL;DR CloudBridge has three concepts when it comes to naming and identifying objects:

  • id is a unique identifier for an object, always auto-generated;
  • name is a read-only, user-friendly value which is suitable for display to the end-user;
  • label is a user-assignable value that can be changed.

The name is often derived from the label but not always. Not all resources support labels. Some only accept names, which can be specified at object creation time (e.g. keypairs). Both names and labels adhere to the same restrictions - a minimum length of 3 which should be alphanumeric characters or dashes only. Names or labels should not begin or end with a dash, or have consecutive dashes.