Winged Monkey

Greg Blomquist gblomqui at redhat.com
Thu Oct 25 12:51:28 UTC 2012



----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matt Wagner" <matt.wagner at redhat.com>
> To: "Greg Blomquist" <gblomqui at redhat.com>
> Cc: aeolus-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 5:12:37 PM
> Subject: Re: Winged Monkey
> 
> 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
> 

Matt,

I truly appreciate your honesty.  Moreover, I can't say I completely
disagree.

I'm not, beyond a shadow of a doubt, convinced that the right answer
isn't to drop this into Conductor.  OK, one more time in English: I
can understand wanting to drop this into Conductor, or spend the time
revamping the "user" side of Conductor.  I'm also not convinced that
won't eventually happen.

But, I see this as an opportunity to explore some possibly very 
complicated user experience ideas geared specifically to non-technical
users in a more free-form environment.

Re: the admin stuff.  You're right, we're studiously brushing that 
under the carpet in these early days of exploration.  However, I'm 
definitely keeping the concept of how to provide good admin 
capabilities as a main topic.  The main idea I keep circling around
is how to tie in Conductor's cloud administration.  For all the of
seemingly superfluous pieces in Conductor, I think that it has
managed to correctly capture the difficulty in administrating
connections to multiple cloud connections.  A feat I don't think
anyone wants to attempt to repeat.

Re: all the great ideas swirling around in your head.  Yes!  This is
precisely what we want to talk about.  We want to mine all the ideas
of end user cloud interaction with the primary focus being on the 
non-technical user.

VerySoonNow(tm), we want to start setting up G+ hangouts, and 
getting all the ideas out in the open.  Jeremy has done an amazing
job capturing the concepts we've thrown around, and synthesizing 
them into some fantastic wireframes.  But, I'm sure there are other
ideas out there.  I feel like we've only just begun exploring this
concept, and there's still quite a bit left to figure out before we
can really start diving into producing a piece of software that fits
the bill.

But, that's not gonna stop me from coding. :)

----
 Greg



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