Winged Monkey

Scott Seago sseago at redhat.com
Wed Oct 24 20:19:20 UTC 2012


On 10/24/2012 04:14 PM, Andy Goldstein wrote:
> Hi Greg,
>
> How is this different than the "Monitor" (non-Admin) section of Conductor?
>
> Thanks,
> Andy
Hi Andy,

Greg could expand more, but a simple answer is in this section of the 
announcement:
> A Winged Monkey is not a ...
>
> ... Conductor.  Winged Monkey will avoid providing any type of cloud account
> multiplexing directly.  It will avoid cloud management interfaces.  It will
> not build or push images to back end providers.  And, it will not implement
> quota and cost management.
>
> Instead, it's more likely that Winged Monkey would like to plug into Conductor
> APIs to take advantage of these features.

The "monitor" section of conductor is simply the "application/instance 
launching and control" section of Conductor. the "admin" section is 
where providers, users, etc. are managed. It's not really admin vs. 
admin -- even administrators deal with application-level stuff via Monitor.

In any case, the above spells out how Winged Monkey differs from 
Conductor -- and when we say "Conductor" -- if we're talking about 
launching stuff, that's all handled on the (poorly-named) "Monitor" section.

Scott

> On Oct 24, 2012, at 1:21 PM, Greg Blomquist wrote:
>
>> What is Winged Monkey?
>>
>> The idea for Winged Monkey started as a simple end user cloud access portal.
>> We are trying our best to stick to this idea.  But, it requires a certain set
>> of consistent key ideas:
>>
>> * Winged Monkey is geared towards users and not administrators
>> * Winged Monkey should provide simple usable access to cloud back ends
>> * Winged Monkey cannot do anything that a back end provider cannot do
>>
>> In the end, we want it to be an attractive, simple, and intuitive user
>> interface that makes the resources of multiple underlying cloud providers
>> accessible to non-technical users who are focused on achieving their goals
>> rather than on attempting to understand the "cloud".
>>
>>
>> Why Winged Monkey?
>>
>> Originally, the name started as joke.  But, like all project names, we
>> rationalized the name to fit the project.  The monkey only knows how to do
>> simple things.  If you teach the monkey, it can eventually learn to do more
>> complex things.  It's still just a monkey, though, and will never be the
>> smartest primate in the room.  It's one advantage is that it has wings, so it
>> can play in the clouds.
>>
>>
>> Monkey Goals
>>
>> The primary focus is to make a simple user interface for cloud resource
>> consumption.  The simplest interface we think we can provide is one where a
>> user can start/stop VMs and launch pre-existing applications.
>>
>> The simplest ideas are sometimes the hardest to implement.  For instance, how
>> do we provide the ability to start/stop VMs against various back ends while
>> trying to shield the user from having to configure the access to those back
>> ends?  Clearly there needs to be an administrative component.  We're just
>> doing our best not to worry too much about the administrative side at this
>> point.  The fact is that there are several other applications that handle
>> cross cloud administration.  Eventually, we'll likely just tie into one of
>> those systems to off load the administrative
>> portions.
>>
>> If it turns out we need to implement something that's already implemented by
>> another application, we'll grudgingly do it.  But, we're gonna exhaust every
>> potential integration point, first.
>>
>>
>> A Winged Monkey is not a ...
>>
>> ... Conductor.  Winged Monkey will avoid providing any type of cloud account
>> multiplexing directly.  It will avoid cloud management interfaces.  It will
>> not build or push images to back end providers.  And, it will not implement
>> quota and cost management.
>>
>> Instead, it's more likely that Winged Monkey would like to plug into Conductor
>> APIs to take advantage of these features.
>>
>> ... Deltacloud.  Winged Monkey is an end-user application, and not intended to
>> be an API.
>>
>> If Winged Monkey takes advantage of Conductor's API for account multiplexing
>> and cloud cost/quota, it will in turn be using the Deltacloud API to connect
>> to cloud back ends.
>>
>> ... Heat API.  Winged Monkey will not have a concept of stack templates or
>> managing the high availability of applications running in the cloud.
>>
>> Winged Monkey will rely on APIs like Heat to provide stack (or application)
>> deployments and health monitoring.
>>
>> ... Foreman.  Winged Monkey will not present puppet classes or manifests for
>> configuration management.  It will not contain administration for networking
>> configuration of hosts or guests.
>>
>> Winged Monkey could use the Foreman API to launch systems that connect to a
>> puppetmaster for configuration management.
>>
>>
>> Progress so far
>>
>> Everything we've done so far has been in the vein of brainstorming.
>>
>> Jeremy Perry has put together some excellent wireframes[1] that nicely convey
>> the theme of simple user interface for consuming cloud resources.
>>
>> We threw together some high level user stories[2] that try to capture what we
>> would want this thing to do.
>>
>> And, I've started an extremely simple rails app[3] that attempts to meet
>> Jeremy's wireframes.  The current goal of the rails app is to connect directly
>> to oVirt and show what pieces of the proposed user interface can actually be
>> provided.
>>
>>
>> Milestones
>>
>> We're still working on these.
>>
>>
>> Call for help
>>
>> We are in need of people who want to explore this idea further.  We're looking
>> for people who:
>>
>> * are good at visual design and user experience
>> * have interesting ideas about servicing end users of cloud resources
>> * dream in ruby/rails
>>
>> Initially, we want the team to stay small.  There's not a lot of work to divvy
>> out right now, so there's not a immediate need for a bunch of helping hands.
>>
>> But, we also want feedback.  If you think we're heading down the wrong path,
>> speak up!  If you have ideas about how to make this idea work, speak up!  If
>> you just wanna find out why we would do this, speak up!
>>
>>
>> [1]: https://github.com/wingedmonkey/documents
>> [2]: https://github.com/wingedmonkey/documents/wiki/Winged-Monkey-User-Stories
>> [3]: https://github.com/wingedmonkey/wingedmonkey
>>
>> ---
>> Greg




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