You may encounter the following error if you try to use python-novaclient (stable/mitaka version) to interact with nova (also stable/mitaka version):

$ nova list
ERROR (AttributeError): 'unicode' object has no attribute 'get'

Specifically the versions are:

$ nova --version
3.3.2
$ nova-api --version
13.1.1

The culprit is this line from novaclient.exceptions

if hasattr(body, 'keys'):
    error = body[list(body)[0]]
    message = error.get('message')
    details = error.get('details')

Which is in turn caused by a change in upstream WebOb. So this error should be only observable if your WebOb is of version >=1.6.0 on the server side and you have a python-novaclient with a version of <=3.4.0 on the client side. python-novaclient 3.4.0 contains a fix to handle this case:

if hasattr(body, 'keys'):
    # NOTE(mriedem): WebOb<1.6.0 will return a nested dict structure
    # where the error keys to the message/details/code. WebOb>=1.6.0
    # returns just a response body as a single dict, not nested,
    # so we have to handle both cases (since we can't trust what we're
    # given with content_type: application/json either way.
    if 'message' in body:
        # WebOb 1.6.0 case
        message = body.get('message')
        details = body.get('details')
    else:
        # WebOb<1.6.0 where we assume there is a single error message
        # key to the body that has the message and details.
        error = body[list(body)[0]]
        message = error.get('message')
        details = error.get('details')

Since this behaviour is caused by an external dependency it will probably only come up for source installations where pip was allowed to go wild with the requirements.