Hi all,
On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 16:30 -0400, Matt Wagner wrote:
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.
+1, because why not
It could just be a GUI client for Deltacloud. Maybe Qt, as Nitesh's
specialty.
I've checked the code and I'd like to try playing with QtQuick[3]. I
feel that it could be great opportunity to have some real app for use it
there and have a fun with it.
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.
+1
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/
The truth is that the functionality is overlapping WM project's
functionality. Still the difference, that can attract "other" type of
people, that doesnt want to run N-# of web-based apps, can be target of
desktop app.
If desktop app hit some community support, it can help to improve UX in
WM also.
@matt: does 'aeolus-gui' exist as the package for fedora ?
[3]
http://qt.digia.com/Product/qt-quick/