Winged Monkey

Scott Seago sseago at redhat.com
Wed Oct 24 20:43:54 UTC 2012


On 10/24/2012 04:40 PM, Greg Blomquist wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Scott Seago" <sseago at redhat.com>
>> To: aeolus-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 4:33:35 PM
>> Subject: Re: Winged Monkey
>>
>> On 10/24/2012 04:27 PM, Andy Goldstein wrote:
>>> On Oct 24, 2012, at 4:19 PM, Scott Seago wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>> I guess I'm still confused :-(  I read the "not a Conductor"
>>> section you referenced but I don't see any difference, once you
>>> strip out the admin section.  You can launch VMs from Conductor,
>>> and you can stop them, just like what is proposed for Winged
>>> Monkey.  What distinguishes Winged Monkey from Conductor/Monitor?
>>>
>>> Andy
>> The thing is -- stripping out the admin section doesn't change the
>> functionality of conductor (although I guess it would make it harder
>> to
>> set up providers and users, etc).
>>
>> When you go to conductor and launch an instance, Conductor will use
>> its
>> provider selection algorithm (based on the configuration of the
>> environment, providers, realms, etc) to determine where to launch an
>> instance -- and launch it there. There are two key things here (that
>> are
>> really the essence of conductor):
>> 1) the user launching doesn't necessarily know whether the instance
>> will
>> launch in ec2, on RHEV, or wherever -- the system decides that based
>> on
>> a variety of internal parameters
>> 2) the user launching isn't in posession of the actual authentication
>> credentials on the provider (i.e. ec2, etc).
>>
>> Winged monkey is a much thinner layer than conductor -- the user will
>> explicitly choose a provider endpoint, and (at least from what's said
>> above) will already be in possession of the access credentials for
>> the
>> provider. You could think of Winged Monkey as an "end user
>> application"
>> front end for deltacloud, whereas Conductor is more of its own
>> "complex"
>> application, for which Deltacloud is just one of several external
>> services it talks to to do its job.
> I agree with that.  With the one caveat being that it remains an
> eventual goal of Winged Monkey to use Conductor as a "back end
> provider".
>
> Conductor has a lot to offer from:
>    * account multiplexing
>    * quota management
>    * state monitoring
>   
> Conductor might even one day supply logic or API for cloud chargeback
> (maybe?).
>
For this, would you want to be able to access conductor via the 
deltacloud API (i.e. we write a deltacloud driver for conductor), or 
would conductor be a "special" provider and you use the conductor native 
API? The former would let you use most of your code as-is, but you'd 
lose out on conductor-specific stuff (and someone would need to write 
that driver). The latter would let you do everything conductor can do 
(but you'd need to write a lot more code for winged monkey).

Scott




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