[dev] Do admin functions belong in libcloud?

[da...@stfc.ac.uk]

Hi,

Thanks very much for your work on libcloud!

Our project is to create a cloud services web portal for a community of scientific researchers. We have a working
demo using libcloud's 'vcloud' driver (our private cloud infrastructure is administered by VMWare vDirector).

We are now elaborating further, and looking to implement user onboarding, etc. Am I right in thinking that libcloud drivers do not provide admin functionality such as adding users, managing roles, etc?

Our vDirector back end has APIs for these operations. For example, a POST to '/admin/org/{id}/users' will add a new user.

Should we be thinking of contributing this functionality to the 'vcloud' driver, or are these operations outside the scope of libcloud?

Kind regards,

Dave.

==============================
David Haynes MEng CEng MIET
Software Engineer
Thuswise Limited

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Harwell, UK
-- 
Scanned by iCritical.

Re: [dev] Do admin functions belong in libcloud?

[Tomaz Muraus <to...@apache.org>]

Hi,

My replies are on-line.

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 5:52 PM,  <da...@stfc.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks very much for your work on libcloud!

You are welcome. Glad that you find the library useful!

>
> Our project is to create a cloud services web portal for a community of scientific researchers. We have a working
> demo using libcloud's 'vcloud' driver (our private cloud infrastructure is administered by VMWare vDirector).
>
> We are now elaborating further, and looking to implement user onboarding, etc. Am I right in thinking that libcloud drivers do not provide admin functionality such as adding users, managing roles, etc?

Yes, you are correct. Libcloud currently doesn't provide this functionality.

>
> Our vDirector back end has APIs for these operations. For example, a POST to '/admin/org/{id}/users' will add a new user.
>
> Should we be thinking of contributing this functionality to the 'vcloud' driver, or are these operations outside the scope of libcloud?

Currently this functionality is outside the scope of Libcloud. The
reason for that is that admin APIs are usually pretty decoupled from
the client APIs; they use different authentication, API endpoint, etc.

This means that having admin API methods on the client driver wouldn't
work so well with the existing Libcloud model. On top of that it would
be kinda weird and counter-intuitive. If we ever decide to include
that, it would probably be a separate included as part of a separate
driver / class.

I do know that Libcloud has some nice abstractions for working with
HTTP APIs, etc. which might make it seem like a good candidate for
this functionality, but I'm kinda worried about feature creep and
leaning against inclusion of this functionality in the core.

In any case, if someone can come up with a good proposal for inclusion
of this functionality which feels "right" and makes sense, I'm open to
debating the inclusion further :)

>
> Kind regards,
>
> Dave.
>
> ==============================
> David Haynes MEng CEng MIET
> Software Engineer
> Thuswise Limited
>
> Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
> Harwell, UK
> --
> Scanned by iCritical.