Winged Monkey

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Oct 24 21:12:37 UTC 2012


Hi Greg,

Thanks for sending this out!

I have to admit that I'm of two minds here -- I really like many of the
ideas, but I also really question whether this is the right way to go
about it. So what follows is kind of an ambivalent response, with
feedback coming from both angles. Sorry about that.

It feels a bit like to me like we're reimplementing half of Conductor.
We're implementing the "good parts" and leaving the confusing admin
scraps behind. I understand the appeal of starting fresh, but I'm not
sure it's really the way to go. Why can't we just make Conductor more
useful for these "simpler" use cases? We used to have a self-service
portal but it kind of withered away. Why not just re-implement it,
following these ideas, and follow the good practices you propose to make
all of Conductor better and easier-to-use?

I also feel a bit like we're trying to make the app easy-to-use by
leaving the hard parts out. Our configuration is indeed very complicated
and there's room for improvement, but I'm not sure that the fix for this
is to make a new app that ignores it entirely -- someone's still going
to have to solve the configuration part.

But those questions/thoughts aside, I really like the Winged Monkey
idea. I think we've neglected the entire market of people that want to
manage a few instances, versus enterprise customers. As I said in
another thread today, I have a single persistent VM instance I use for
hosting my websites, and then I periodically spin up cloud instances to
test or tinker with things. Conductor is really not usable here -- I
don't want to set up all of the components, and I don't want to build my
own instances. I just want to manage a few instances, and launch
pre-built AMIs. (Not necessarily mine, though -- I just want to launch
the "Amazon Linux" AMI or whatnot.)

I'm also interested in some of the new features Winged Monkey seems to
add. It shows resource utilization and offers clone/snapshot options for
instances -- two things I was just wishing for in the earlier thread.

Looking at the wireframes, I also really like the way we express the
application lifecycle. The sparkcharts and other little charts are also
really slick and seem like they would work out really well.

I find it interesting that today, Mo sent out an email brainstorming a
neat idea for a cloud desktop client, I replied with a fairly different
idea that I thought would be more suited to a web app, and then you sent
out the information on what you folks have been working on for Winged
Monkey. Even though the ideas are a bit different, it seems like there's
a lot we have in common, and that it's something we've really got to do!

-- Matt



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