Glance's Metadata Definitions Catalog Availability

It's a clear fact that OpenStack is a huge set of projects that are growing on a day-to-day basis, which might make it hard to keep up with all the features that are up and coming in current and new releases.

One of those overlooked features which were added in the Juno release of Glance, the image API, which is the inclusion of a metadata definition catalogue API. This catalogue allows you to get a full listing of all the metadata keys which you can use to control the behaviour of your infrastructure.

As of today, we are going to start progressively use the metadata definition catalogue to provide our customers with useful metadata that they can set up on their instance, images or any OpenStack resource to get the behaviour that they need.

First, we're currently starting with our IP licensing system that automatically activates and deactivates licenses with our partner, cPanel. By simply setting this property on your image or server/instance, you'll have a cPanel license activated within a minute.

{  
   "self" : "/v2/metadefs/namespaces/licensing",  
   "description" : "Metadata definitions for all IP-licensed applications available",  
   "schema" : "/v2/schemas/metadefs/namespace",  
   "owner" : "d7594b0298b54bcc9e4e0f252e1da2e4",  
   "display_name" : "Application Licensing",  
   "objects" : [  
      {  
         "updated_at" : "2015-04-26T02:12:06Z",  
         "properties" : {  
            "cpanel" : {  
               "default" : "False",  
               "title" : "cPanel License",  
               "type" : "boolean",  
               "description" : "Activate cPanel license for this image"  
            }  
         },  
         "name" : "cPanel",  
         "created_at" : "2015-04-26T02:12:06Z",  
         "required" : [  
            "cpanel"  
         ],  
         "self" : "/v2/metadefs/namespaces/licensing/objects/cPanel",  
         "description" : "cPanel & WHM (available via Partner NOC)",  
         "schema" : "/v2/schemas/metadefs/object"  
      }  
   ],  
   "updated_at" : "2015-04-26T02:06:03Z",  
   "visibility" : "public",  
   "namespace" : "licensing",  
   "protected" : true,  
   "resource_type_associations" : [  
      {  
         "created_at" : "2015-04-26T02:07:05Z",  
         "name" : "OS::Glance::Image",  
         "updated_at" : "2015-04-26T02:07:05Z",  
         "prefix" : "licensing_"  
      },  
      {  
         "updated_at" : "2015-04-26T02:53:12Z",  
         "prefix" : "licensing_",  
         "created_at" : "2015-04-26T02:53:12Z",  
         "name" : "OS::Nova::Instance"  
      }  
   ],  
   "created_at" : "2015-04-26T02:06:03Z"  
}  

This means that simply by setting the licensing_cpanel property on an image to True, all your servers that use that image will automatically get cPanel licenses activated on them within a minute. If you choose to set that metadata parameter on your server, it will activate a cPanel license on that specific server.

One of the advantages of this is that when using metadata stored on images, it copied when you take a new snapshot, which means that licenses will automatically be activated in the future on any new images as well.

At the moment, you can update these image properties using the Glance CLI, however, we'll be updating our interface to allow you to do this directly from there soon. As for the server metadata, you can edit this already from our CloudCnsole control panel.

$ glance image-update "cPanel/WHM" --property licensing_cpanel=True  
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------+  
| Property                     | Value                                |  
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------+  
...  
| Property 'licensing_cpanel'  | True                                 |  
...  
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

We have a lot of very useful features on our public cloud which allows you to control the topology of CPUs, enable or disable the usage of our cloudagent and many other tweaks which you can use. We'll announce them as we roll them into our public cloud.