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/
