On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 05:37:48PM -0400, Greg Blomquist wrote:
Thanks for following along, Eric!
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eric Helms" <ehelms(a)redhat.com>
> To: aeolus-devel(a)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(a)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