[Hawkular-dev] Tenant no longer in URL in the upcoming Inventory 0.1.0

Fri Jun 12 11:39:15 EDT 2015

Hello Lukas,

You are conflating two concepts in a bad way. First is multi-tenancy and second is authentication. It just happens now the path of least resistance is to couple the concepts. The requirements for each might change over time, so coupling them straight in the design will have negative effects.

Here is how Metrics approaches this:
1) 'Hawkular-Tenant' header is the tenant differentiator
2) 'Hawkular-Tenant' validation and verification is not yet defined
3) For now use a naive approach that accepts and trusts any incoming values 
4) When Hawkular Accounts has the authentication filter ready, Metrics will defer decisions to Accounts. All the logic will be contained in a single filter. Some of the logic will be to map an Accounts concept (the strong guess is Persona) to 'Hawkular-Tenant'.
5) Any other service will go through a similar process as in step 4; see below ...

The process to integrate Metrics into another project:
1) Find the authentication mechanism (algorithm, service, database, etc.)
2) Create a filter to integrate with the authentication source
3) Validate & verify using the external source and then translate to 'Hawkular-Tenant'

My proposal revolves around keeping the individual service architecture and design clean with regards to multi-tenancy. If you do not see any value in that for Hawkular Inventory then this discussion does not benefit your project.

Thank you,
Stefan 

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lukas Krejci" <lkrejci at redhat.com>
> To: hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org
> Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 9:02:52 AM
> Subject: Re: [Hawkular-dev] Tenant no longer in URL in the upcoming	Inventory	0.1.0
> 
> On Thursday, June 11, 2015 13:18:43 Stefan Negrea wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I hope we standardize on Hawkular-Tenant at service level. The concept of
> > the persona is narrow and accounts specific. While we are mapping now
> > personas to tenants that could change in the future.
> > 
> > Also, the concepts of tenant and multi-tenancy are easier to document and
> > understand by external consumers. If/when the individual services are
> > decoupled and consumed by other projects or independently, there is no
> > extra documentation needed to explain the multi-tenant capability.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I actually hope for quite the opposite ;) I hope we standardize on Hawkular
> Accounts providing auth and (help with) authz and the rest of the components
> using that info. Alerts and Inventory already do that. I hope Metrics will
> join soon.
> 
> You are right that "Hawkular-Persona" is a header that "suggests"
> authentication rather than multi-tenancy, but that's exactly how it is used
> in
> inventory and alerts - we use accounts primarily for authentication.
> 
> The fact that tenant = persona is not really that important and in fact if we
> decide in the future that tenant != persona, we might introduce another
> header, Hawkular-Tenant most probably, that will override the behavior we
> currently support by equating the auth and multi-tenancy (which btw. makes a
> lot of sense, at least for now).
> 
> Metrics currently does not offer any form of authentication as far as I am
> aware, so an important part of the multi-tenancy picture is missing from it.
> 
> IMHO the situation in inventory and alerts is much better now in that regard
> -
> we delegate the tenant creation/updates, permission grants, etc. to accounts,
> let it figure out what the user performing a request is in any way it chooses
> (basic auth, oauth, optionally override default persona with the Hawkular-
> Persona header, if deemed necessary) and use that to perform security checks.
> 
> As a user of the current Hawkular I would find it weird to have to specify my
> creds/token, potentially a persona overriding header AND a tenant header if,
> as it is right now, the tenant id and the persona id would always be the
> same.
> 
> I know that metrics are special and have to function outside of Hawkular,
> too,
> but when inside Hawkular, IMHO, they should blend in and not require special
> treatment - most of all when applying security.
> 
> If you figure out a way of blending in Hawkular AND functioning on your own
> nicely, it'd be nice if the rest of us could reuse that solution. But at
> least
> for inventory, there is not direct requirement to run outside of Hawkular.
> 
> > Thank you,
> > Stefan
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > 
> > > From: "John Mazzitelli" <mazz at redhat.com>
> > > To: "Discussions around Hawkular development"
> > > <hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org> Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 9:26:59 AM
> > > Subject: Re: [Hawkular-dev] Tenant no longer in URL in the upcoming
> > > Inventory	0.1.0
> > > 
> > > I thought it was Hawkular-Tenant, not Hawkular-Persona.
> > > 
> > > I used Hawkular-Tenant header name in my changes to support metrics 0.3.5
> > > 
> > > The name "Hawkular-Persona" is a new one to me.
> > > 
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > 
> > > > Hi all,
> > > > 
> > > > I just wanted to let you know about the breaking change in the upcoming
> > > > Inventory 0.1.0.
> > > > 
> > > > Following the suite of metrics, inventory will no longer support the
> > > > tenantID
> > > > in the URL and will solely rely on Hawkular accounts to hand it the
> > > > tenantID
> > > > to use - i.e. it will be the tenant of the currently logged in user or
> > > > of
> > > > the
> > > > persona passed in using the "Hawkular-Persona" header.
> > > > 
> > > > Cheers,
> > > > 
> > > > Lukas
> > > > 
> > > > _______________________________________________
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> > > > hawkular-dev at lists.jboss.org
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