[Hawkular-dev] Tenant Id - Not Part of URL

[Lukas Krejci]

How do metrics' tenants fit into the hawkular accounts and its persona concept?

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Stefan Negrea" <snegrea at redhat.com>
> To: "Discussions" <hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, 28 April, 2015 5:44:56 PM
> Subject: [Hawkular-dev] Tenant Id - Not Part of URL
> 
> Hello Everybody,
> 
> I've been working on a PR for the upcoming Hawkular Metrics release that will
> remove the tenant id from the end-point URLs. The tenant id will be moved to
> either a header parameter or a query parameter. The query parameter is in
> place for cases (such as curl) where setting a header is not possible,
> difficult, or inconvenient.
> 
> Here is an example of the change:
> 
> Existing URL:
> /{tenantId}/gauge/{metricId}/data
> 
> New URL:
> /gauge/{metricId}/data
> 
> Tenant id set via:
> 1) header - tenantId
> 2) query parameter - tenantId
> 
> 
> There are two exceptions to this rule, /tenants and /db/{tenantid}/series.
> The /tenants end-point will be changed into something different in the
> upcoming releases since it is mostly a management type API that does not
> belong in the same place with the regular metrics endpoint. And
> /db/{tenantid}/series end-point is needed in this exact format for
> compatibility with Influxdb compatible services.
> 
> 
> Now, to the merits of this change. The tenant id is volatile, can change any
> time, and changes to it should be expected; but the rest of the URL is
> fixed. The second issue is that the tenant id is a security concern. So we
> were limited in design choices since a security concern was leaking as part
> of the URL.
> 
> So removing the tenant id from the URL will give us permanent & consistent
> addresses for resources (metrics and metric data points). And we will gain a
> lot of flexibility on the security side. In the future, users could
> authenticate with a user/pass combo and the backend would transform that
> into a tenant id to be used on the request. If the same user later decides
> to use a tenant id to pass along the request, the URL of the resources would
> not change. Another expectation is that tenant id is not sufficient, it is
> typically a combo of id + secret; so we would have resorted to a header or
> query param for the second piece of information (the secret).
> 
> This change will give us the flexibility to adjust the security model (the
> meaning of tenant ids and ways to validate them) without compromising the
> URL structure. This will help Hawkular Metrics as it gets integrated into
> more and more projects and products.
> 
> Here are the links to the JIRA and the PR for this change:
> https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-metrics/pull/202
> https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS-68
> 
> 
> 
> Thank you,
> Stefan Negrea
> 
> Software Engineer
> 
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