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/
