Re: A branching-out suggestion: virt-manager for cloud

From: "Matt Wagner" <matt.wagner(a)redhat.com&gt; To: aeolus-devel(a)lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Friday, April 5, 2013 4:30:13 PM Subject: A branching-out suggestion: virt-manager for cloud Hi folks, I was chatting a bit with Nitesh earlier today. (He wrote the Aeolus-gui[1] app a while back, as you may recall.) First off, it made me realize that the current situation is probably unclear and alienating to people who aren't working on Aeolus full-time. We've been talking a bit about whether we want to move away from Conductor and in favor of a cloud broker approach, and then we've also been talking about leaving Fedora, etc. I think we're moving in the right direction and Aeolus will be a better project because of it, but I'm not sure things have been made abundantly clear on the list. (Though the wiki page helps.) We were chatting a bit about what would be beneficial to the Aeolus project as a whole, and floated the idea of some sort of lightweight little app for managing cloud instances. And an idea sort of formed. I think it would be interesting to build something like virt-manager[2], but for managing cloud instances. Nothing fancy, and probably not scalable to the enterprise market where people might be managing a handful of instances. It could just be a GUI client for Deltacloud. Maybe Qt, as Nitesh's specialty. I think there are a few reasons this could be pretty neat: 1.) It's easy to start small and scale up. Grab a list of instances from Deltacloud, and let the user pick one to launch, on a given hardware profile, and show a list of running instances. Over time, you can work in reporting on statistics; disk/network/etc. management, etc.; a VNC client where supported. 2.) You could support multiple providers the same way that virt-manager supports multiple hypervisors -- just add multiple, and show them separately. You can have a collapsible EC2 section and a collapsible OpenStack section in the same app. 3.) It could be a fun project while we work on figuring out what we're doing long-term. 4.) Most of our plans for an eventual cloud broker involve exposing a Deltacloud API in Aeolus, that would transparently map to the ideal cloud provider. Thus, this app could work with whatever we end up building. 5.) Having a lightweight client for whatever we're building would be pretty useful, so we wouldn't be constrained to the API-only. And having it be a generic client for clouds would emphasize our value-add, versus being a heavy monolithic app. 6.) It might attract a different crowd than "enterprise hybrid cloud" attracts. I think that's a good thing, especially upstream. Enterprise hybrid cloud management is sort of a niche market. I think there are many more people that would be interested in a lightweight little desktop GUI for managing cloud instances, but that some of the problems we'd be solving overlap a lot. IOW, I think it has potential to grow the community, and that this would still translate into building a better, more robust enterprise-y management app. What do you think? Have I gone insane? Would this be a worthwhile endeavor? -- Matt [1] https://github.com/niteshnarayanlal/Aeolus-gui [2] http://virt-manager.org/