What is the recommended approach for handling regional time zone offsets in OpenStack API responses?

OpenStack services, including Keystone and Nova, standardize internal timestamping and database storage using UTC to maintain consistency across distributed regional deployments. While API responses typically return timestamps in ISO 8601 format, the core services delegate time synchronization to the host operating system via NTP or chrony.

Because the database schema does not store regional time zone offsets, there is an uncertainty regarding where the conversion to local time should occur to ensure a consistent user experience across different geographic regions without introducing clock skew issues.

Technical Constraints

• Internal consistency relies on UTC for token expiration and instance state transitions.
• Regional offsets are not managed within the core OpenStack API logic.

Which layer is the intended location for converting UTC timestamps to regional time zones for end-user presentation? Does OpenStack provide any native configuration to influence the time zone of the ISO 8601 strings returned by the API, or must this be handled exclusively by the client application?