API Stability Thoughts

Recently in the OpenStack API Working Group we have been spending a lot of time and energy on establishing the API Stability guidelines that will serve as the basis for the supports-api-stability tag proposed by the OpenStack Technical Committee. Tags are a way for consumers of OpenStack to get a better idea as to the state of the various projects, and this particular tag is intended to reassure consumers that the API for a project with this tag would not change in a breaking way. The problem with that is defining what exactly constitutes a “breaking change”.

While there are about as many opinions as there are participants in the discussion, they all roughly fall into one of two camps:

  1. A change that simply adds to the existing API, such as returning additional values in addition to the current ones, isn’t breaking stability, as existing clients will still receive all the information they expect, and will ignore the additional stuff.
  2. Any cloud that says it is running a particular version of an API should return the exact same information. In other words, a client written for Cloud A will work without modification with Cloud B. If something changes that would make these responses different, that change must be reflected in a new version, and the old version should remain available for a “long time” (precisely how long a “long time” is is a completely separate discussion in itself!).

I wrote about the second point above in an earlier post, which attempted to summarize that position after some discussion with many in the community who were pushing cloud interoperability (or “interop”). And at the recent Atlanta PTG (which I recapped here), we discussed this issue at length. The problem was that those who fell into Camp #1 above were at the morning session, while Camp #2 was there in the afternoon. So while the discussions were fruitful, they were not decisive. The discussions and comments on the Gerrit review for the proposed change to the API Stability Guidelines since the PTG reflect this division of opinion and lack of resolution.

But today during discussions in the API-WG meeting on IRC, it dawned on me that there is a fundamental reason we can’t reconcile these two points of view: we’re talking about 2 different goals. Camp #1 is concerned with not breaking clients whose applications rely on an OpenStack service’s API, while Camp #2 is concerned with not having different cloud deployments vary from each other.

The latter goal, while admirable, is very difficult to achieve in practice for anything but the most basic stuff. For one thing, any service that uses extensions will almost certainly fail, because there is no way to guarantee that deployments will always install and run the same extensions – that’s sort of the point of extensibility, after all. And during the discussions at the PTG, we tried to identify versioning systems that could meet the interop requirements, and the only one anyone could describe was microversions. So that means to satisfy Camp #2, a service would have to use microversions, period.

So I propose a slightly different route forward: let’s define 2 tags to reflect these two different types of “stability”. Let’s use the original tag “assert:supports-api-compatibility” to mean the Camp #2 standard, as its emphasis is interoperability. Then add a separate “assert:supports-api-stability”, which reflects the Camp #1 understanding of never breaking clients.

It is important to note that this second tag is not meant to indicate a “light” version of the first, just because the requirements wouldn’t be as difficult to attain. It reflects support for a different, but still important, continuity for their users. Each project can decide which of these goals are relevant to it, and will make their APIs better by achieving either (or both!) goals.