Winged Monkey

Angus Thomas athomas at redhat.com
Thu Oct 25 13:37:06 UTC 2012


On 10/24/2012 10:12 PM, Matt Wagner wrote:
> 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'm not sure this is an either/or choice. We can, and should continue to 
make Conductor simpler to use, in all cases.  Not least because Winged 
Monkey is going to take time to implement, and longer to use a fully 
featured Conductor API to expose Conductor's capabilities through a 
simplified, end-user UI.

Until that day, Conductor has to continue to solve these problems 
itself, so I think we should borrow good ideas from Jeremy's wireframes 
etc., and use them to improve Conductor, wherever we can.

Worst case is that, in twelve months time, we'll have two applications 
which both give a simple, elegant user experience. That would be a nice 
problem to have.

At that point, it might make sense to de-scope some stuff from 
Conductor, which, as mentioned already on this thread, attempts to do a 
great many things, and could benefit from a simpler purpose, and to rely 
on Winged Monkey instead. That's not a decision we have to face now though.

> 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.

Solving the configuration part, doing all the hard parts, is the core of 
what Conductor does well in its presentation of a managed, synthetic 
cloud, as Hugh referred to it on this thread. Winged Monkey does indeed 
have the luxury of ignoring some of those hard problems, but only 
because Conductor has them covered.

One of the things that I think is attractive about Winged Monkey is 
that, if it all comes together, it'll be possible to fire it up, and 
give users a slick, intuitive interface, for a limited number of tasks, 
without needing Conductor or Heat or I'd hope, even needing Deltacloud.

Winged Monkey could be pointed directly at ovirt/vsphere/openstack and 
present a user portal.

Of course, some of the fancier features mocked up in Jeremy's wireframes 
wouldn't appear in the Winged Monkey UI, but the core goal of allowing 
users to manage their instances would work.

That's an attractive, versatile goal for Winged Monkey which has the 
potential to make it interesting to several other projects.

The fact that Conductor has the account multiplexing, the multi-instance 
deployables, the quotas etc., and we're working on features like cost 
management means that Conductor is likely to enable more features in the 
Winged Monkey UI than any other potential provider would but, going back 
to the original point, that is because Conductor is doing a good job of 
solving some hard problems.

>
> 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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