fedora desktop / cloud integration

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Oct 24 16:13:25 UTC 2012


On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:13:28AM -0400, Matt Wagner wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 10:47:30AM -0400, Mo Morsi wrote:
> > At today's Fedora Cloud SIG meeting, we discussed something akin to this
> > [1] but for cloud instances. Deltacloud [2] could be used to manage
> > connections to different clouds and we can provide a simple gui dialog
> > to configure providers. This would simplify the Fedora desktop / cloud
> > integration experience and make deploying to the cloud from Fedora
> > completely seamless.
> 
> This is interesting. (Though honestly it just looks to be a prettier
> version of virt-manager?)
> 
> It would be pretty nifty to add Deltacloud support, as you say. Or maybe
> Aeolus support. Right now Aeolus feels like it's more targeted at
> enterprise users, but I'm not sure it has to be. It could be a really
> awesome way to manage a couple of cloud deployments, whether it's
> hosting your website or running something compute-intensive.

Huh, you know, after I sent that, I got thinking some more about how I
would want to use it. I'm sending this to aeolus-devel only, because I
think this is really more about Conductor (and/or Winged Monkey).

For about a year and a half, I've been paying for a VM at a local
hosting provider, to host my websites and a few other things. (They
don't actually provide any management access, but just for the sake of
making the example work, let's pretend they use OpenStack.) I also like
to spin up cloud instances for tinkering with stuff.

So here are some stories to consider. Note that I'm thinking of these as
something I'd use Conductor for, either via Winged Monkey or via "Boxes"
connecting to Conductor.

- I have a running instance hosting my website. I want to click on it,
  select "Backup," and have a snapshot made of it, either locally or on
  the remote cloud provider's storage.

- I want to see CPU/RAM/disk utilization on my instance.

- I want to launch a new instance to play with nginx+PHP on. I want to
  use CentOS 6, drag a slider to indicate that I'd like at least 1GB
  RAM, but for CPUs, "1+" is fine because it doesn't matter to me. I
  don't need persistent storage, and I want the cheapest provider. I
  really couldn't care less where it ends up. (Though maybe I secretly
  want it "close" to me so ssh isn't laggy.)

- The instance hosting my blog is getting slammed with traffic. (I
  wish!) I want to view it, and have an easy way to launch another
  instance on the same provider, so I can put a varnish cache out
  in front.

- The VM I'm hosting my site on got hacked (not really). I want to
  restore it from the backup I made last week.

- I want to host a Counter Strike gameserver for the day. (Does anyone
  still play that?) I want it as close to New England as possible so I
  get low pings, but I don't want to pay a big premium for it. Once the
  thing is running, I need to open whatever ports it requires (27015?).

- I want to ssh or VNC (if supported) into an instance by clicking on
  it. It'd also be nice to allow me to download the key so I can ssh
  in from my terminal.

Now, I use Fedora at work, but mostly use my Mac laptop at home, so I
don't really want to depend on a GNOME app for this. (Granted, I could
ssh -X into my Fedora box and have that work, but I'd really not do that
over a VPN.) I want to just use a web app so I can manage it from
anywhere.

Some notes on how this compares to what we have today:

- In none of these examples do I really want to build my own images.
  There are plenty of pre-built ones that will work perfectly fine.

- I just want to manage a couple of instances. I absolutely do not want
  a dedicated server powering Conductor. I'd even wince at hosting it in
  a t1.micro instance, because that's still $30-40/month. A hosted
  service would be cool.

- I want to define a "HWP" at launch-time, but I don't want to save it.
  This is the same workflow as in virt-manager.

- We have no means of backing up instances.

- We have no means of monitoring instance resource utilization.

- You can kind of do it by restricting something to a given realm, but
  there's really no notion of "I want $x to launch wherever $y is"
  today, but I think that's a common use case.

I'd love to see this stuff make it into Conductor. But I wonder if the
nebulous (pun intended!) "Winged Monkey" concept is a place to play
around with some of these ideas, too.

Sorry for the fact that this is quite orthogonal to the original topic.
:-[

-- Matt




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