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
