glance client needs to support multiple backends

[Ed Balduf]

The ability is in glance to support multiple backend types (Swift, file, ceph, cinder, http) for storage of images. The client previously had the ability to direct the storage of images to different backends (aka stores) via a --store flag. That option was removed with the V2 API. This removes functionality which was useful and needed.

For now one can work around it by forcing the client into V1 api mode, but once V1 api goes away there is no way to accomplish this any more.

$ glance --os-image-api 2 help image-create | grep "\-\-store"
# No option
$ glance --os-image-api 1 help image-create | grep "\-\-store"
usage: glance image-create [--id <IMAGE_ID>] [--name <NAME>] [--store <STORE>]
  --store <STORE> Store to upload image to.

[Ian Cordasco (icordasc)]

Hi Ed!

Thanks for reporting this. The reality of the matter is that Glance V2 is a *significantly* different API than V1 and this behaviour doesn't exist in it. I wasn't around for that decision so I can't speak directly to why it was removed, but I suspect it was for good reasons (probably including security reasons).

I'm going to mark this as Won't Fix, but I've asked others to help explain some of the historical context behind the decision.

Cheers!
Ian

[Ed Balduf (ebalduf)]

Very disappointing that one can't direct their images to certain backends, and kinda makes one wonder why there are all the capabilities in Glance to support multiple backends. It sounds like the v2 API has a way to support multiple backends, but I haven't investigated.