Winged Monkey

Eric Helms ehelms at redhat.com
Mon Oct 29 23:35:34 UTC 2012


I have one follow-up question that popped up into my head.  The differences you outlined are clear to me from a the perspective of a user or organization who is setting up a PaaS or IaaS for consumption by some group of users.  From a user perspective, who is looking at functionality and what a UI provides, the distinction feels less clear to me.  Going from OpenShift to Winged Monkey feels in some respects like simply being granted more control. In other words, as a basic user the OpenShift interface provides a very stream-lined and simplified approach with regards to here is a pre-configured environment that let's me do straight-forward applications really easy.  Now, as I move from being a basic user to one that needs more control, or needs a more complex environment I flip the switch over to a Winged Monkey interface where I now have more options presented to me, more control and the tools to handle my more complex setups.  However, I can also see it from the reverse standpoint after re-reading Greg's response, where you would use Winged Monkey to test and configure an environment, an application stack to a stable point that you could then bundle and present to users via a PaaS.  

Which finally gets me to my question - is there a project goal to achieve both or one direction in particular?

 -Eric

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hugh Brock" <hbrock at redhat.com>
To: "Greg Blomquist" <gblomqui at redhat.com>
Cc: "Eric Helms" <ehelms at redhat.com>, aeolus-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 5:49:35 PM
Subject: Re: Winged Monkey

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 05:37:48PM -0400, Greg Blomquist wrote:
> Thanks for following along, Eric!
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Eric Helms" <ehelms at redhat.com>
> > To: aeolus-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
> > Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 3:28:46 PM
> > Subject: Re: Winged Monkey
> > 
> > 
> > The question: As a user of Openshift, aspects of the design and the
> > feel
> > of the UI feel 1-for-1 and in some respects are attempting to meet
> > the
> > same needs.  On which points are there clear divisions between the
> > two
> > projects? Would I be choosing based on maturity and feature sets down
> > the road or is there a clear 'Openshift fills these needs' while
> > 'Winged
> > Monkey fills these other needs'?
> > 
> 
> This drives to the heart of the distinction between IaaS and PaaS.
> 
> In the long term (and maybe for certain user classes), this distinction
> may become completely blurred.
> 
> However, for the near term (3 years? 5 years? longer?) the distinction is
> still visible.  With PaaS, a consumer is getting a pre-packaged platform
> environment where they can run their specific application (rails, django,
> whatever).  The tradeoff is the amount of control the consumer will have
> with the environment they are allotted.
> 
> With IaaS, the consumer requests a set of resources based on some 
> specification, and will generally have larger control over those resources
> than allowed under PaaS.
> 
> So, whereas OpenShift will supply a user with an environment to run a
> Django app, Winged Monkey will supply a user with a resource for testing
> out installing and configuring Django from scratch.
> 
> Hope that helps.  Lemme know if that doesn't really clear it up.

Yeah I just want to reinforce what Greg said here.

I think (based on my own recent personal experience with this) that it
will be a long time before most people are willing to hand over the keys
to their production apps to the extent you have to do with a PaaS
solution. I'm talking about tight control over software versions,
network configuration, instance sizing, and so on -- all stuff you take
for granted with IaaS, but that PaaS deliberately obscures from you.

This doesn't mean PaaS isn't useful, far far from it. But I think there
are always going to be people who want root on all their VMs, and those
people are going to want a solid management tool that makes managing
them easy across platforms. This is what we're banking on with Winged
Monkey. 

Take care,
--Hugh


-- 
== Hugh Brock, hbrock at redhat.com                                   ==
== Engineering Manager, Cloud BU                                   ==
== Aeolus Project: Manage virtual infrastructure across clouds.    ==
== http://aeolusproject.org                                        ==

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m
not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
--Robert McCloskey



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