Experiment with API, upstream only

* uses just simple queries.
* for more advanced testing it would be good to have some rest wrapper around it.
    * I was asking abellotti if they are planning python client and if not I would make one if we needed it, but the conversation was confusing for me.
For now, I think it makes sense to keep the API tests separate while we're figuring out how we want to handle the interactions (and waiting for downstream to catch up), but using the REST interface in the course of testing to get the info we need from the appliance (versus sshing in, reading from the db, etc) for asserts or program flow is where I'd eventually like to be.