On 11/12/12 11:29 AM, "Chip Childers" <[email protected]> wrote:

>Moving this over to the dev list for a bit more discussion.
>
>I'm not sure I agree with David and Alex entirely here.  Certainly, as
>a user today, orchestrating above ACS is the answer.  Long term, I'm
>not so sure.  There's a very valid user concern at the root of the
>request:  How can you add some level of change governance into the
>core IaaS layer?
>
>Some of this is philosophical, but I like the slides that I've seen
>from Kevin on this topic.  CloudStack is in a position to support two
>types of workloads:  cloud-ified (that's a technical term ;-) ) and
>more traditional systems.  Certainly there is a good bit of industry
>hoopla around telling all of the IT shops out there that they simply
>need to change all of their apps to horizontally scale, design for
>failure, etc...  And I'm a proponent of those design theories.
>Unfortunately, there's a hard truth in IT...  changing the fundamental
>design premise of existing systems isn't easy or affordable for the
>overwhelming majority of IT departments.  That *truth* is exactly why
>CloudStack's ability to support both types of workloads is important
>in the long run.  Most of the capabilities are there, and I believe
>that both use cases can live in harmony within the same project.
>
>Now what to do about it?  I'm not certain yet.  I've been struggling
>with this question for several months now.  I have a need to be able
>to provide end customers with the ease of provisioning and change, *as
>well as* a certain level of policy-based control around what and when
>certain resources can be modified.  For me, change governance matters.
> We're already headed down the path of more granular RBAC functions,
>but could we add additional vectors to that model?  Consider
>traditional "change windows":  specific times when changes are allowed
>within a traditional workload's environment are the norm for many IT
>shops.  They are a process-based attempt at reducing the risk and
>impact of poor change execution.  I don't particularly like them, but
>I know why they exist.  Does time play a part in the act of
>authorizing a change to an element?  If time plays a part, is there a
>place for thinking of self service as including the ability to stage a
>number of changes that get executed by the orchestration system at an
>*appropriate* time?

The Time constraint is the easy one.
There are similar more complex processes that include:
 - getting approvals,
 - updating change tickets,
 - temporary increases in limits
 - security policy (which ports can be opened)
 - authorizing policy exceptions, etc.

>
>I guess I could go out and get (or build) another software package
>that sits on top of cloudstack, only exposing that software to the end
>users.  But doesn't that over complicate the deployment and management
>of the environment?  I'd end up having to provide a completely
>different API layer to the users (removing any value in having the
>EC2/S3 API embedded in CloudStack).  Why shouldn't an IaaS provider
>(and specifically, the cloud orchestration stack) natively provide
>users with self-service change governance capabilities that control
>the who / when and how of the infrastructure automation?  Why can't we
>take the orchestration platform in a direction that allows users to
>trust it with precious and fragile workloads, which aren't capable (at
>the app level) of handling the rapid change that more modern software
>architecture supports?

True, but my worry is it an overreach? Can we architect it so that it is
an integration layer?

>
>Sorry I don't have much of a concrete proposal here, but this thread
>triggered my desire to get the discussion going on *if* we want to
>consider this complexity, and *if so* what are the user scenarios that
>we would want to cover.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>-chip
>
>On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 1:59 PM, David Nalley <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Agreed
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Alex Huang <[email protected]>
>>wrote:
>>> If you want to control this, wouldn't you orchestrate above
>>>CloudStack?  Why put it into CloudStack?
>>>
>>> --Alex
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: David Nalley [mailto:[email protected]]
>>>> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2012 10:48 AM
>>>> To: [email protected]
>>>> Subject: Re: Mail to the administrator when a user want to create a
>>>>instance
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 2:20 AM, zhiqing wu <[email protected]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> > Hi:
>>>> > Mail to the administrator when a user want to create a instance
>>>>,how to
>>>> > achieve this functionality.and which parameter need to modified ?
>>>> >
>>>> > best regards
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Doesn't exist at present.
>>>> You can file an RFE for this functionality, though I'd personally
>>>> think it's a bad idea. One of the core tenets of cloud computing is
>>>> that an end-user is empowered to get things done - not that it becomes
>>>> a portal for asking for permission.
>>>> If you just want to be notified when a user a creates an instance, I
>>>> suppose you could poll the event log periodically and have you
>>>> monitoring/logging system fire alerts when a user deploys a new vm.
>>>>
>>>> --David
>>

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