On 1.2.2013 18:19, Matt Wagner wrote:
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 02:23:36PM -0500, Angus Thomas wrote:
> This is a problem which I've been thinking about in the context of
> Winged Monkey, but it is more generally applicable.
>
> We want Winged Monkey to be available on people’s phones, tablets etc
> so that they can see the state of running instances, receive
> notifications whenever there’s an outage etc..
>
> So long as the users are standing fairly near the server which is
> running Winged Monkey, and can get wifi connectivity to the same
> network that the server is on, then it’s all relatively simple.
>
> However, as soon as users step outside the building, it all gets a
> bit more complex. In order for the users’ phone to be able to connect
> over the internet to the Winged Monkey server, then either the phone
> is going to need to have a VPN connection, which is a significant
> overhead, or the Winged Monkey server instance is going to have to be
> directly accessible over the internet. A lot of the organisations
> which are potential users of Winged Monkey wouldn’t be prepared to do
> that.
I think that trying to use Twitter as a messaging conduit is novel, but
I'm not sure it's really the right solution. (That said, the proposal
was an excellent way to get us proposing other ideas.)
For mobile clients, I think the idea of using native push-messaging is a
good one.
For non-mobile clients, I would argue that it's not quite our problem to
solve. As a system administrator, I feel like I'd either have set up
remote access functionality, or I'd be quite uncomfortable with the idea
of a tool sharing my data outside of the means I set up.
The more I think about this, though, the more I abstract 'Twitter' into
just any old message service hosted in the cloud. Much in the same way
the Audrey will launch a purpose-built config server in your cloud, we
could do the same with a notification service in the cloud if needed.
That way the data would remain (as much as anything else in the cloud)
in the user's control.
Though I still suspect that, although it's an interesting problem that
our customers may have, it's not directly related to our app. (By which
I mean that we should try to solve it in an app-agnostic way, not that
we should refuse to consider trying to solve it.) That is, how to make
$onsite_app accessible to users behind a firewall, especially in a way
that system and network employees would be on board with.
-- Matt
+1
J.