Aeolus Community Assessment

Hugh O. Brock hbrock at redhat.com
Thu Jun 7 21:46:50 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 02:36:11PM -0700, Richard Su wrote:
> I think we have not made a good case on why someone would want to
> use aeolus. And how one would use the tools we have built to do
> something useful.
> 
> I agree with Jay that it is a bit troubling that we have built out
> so many features without direct feedback from
> customers/users/community to understand if there is a need for them.
> For the most part, we have laid the ground work with most of the
> most obvious features, so I do not think we have strayed too far.
> But instead of features, we ought to focus more on building
> solutions to specific problems that users need solving. Exactly
> which problems we aim to solve is something we need to get a better
> handle on.
> 
> Looking at what we have built thus far, it is difficult for me to
> see how it would be useful to a potential customer. Yes, we support
> EC2, RHEV, and vSphere and yes, you can build images and deploy
> them. But would someone really use what we have currently in a
> production environment. I would argue probably not.
> 
> Let us imagine you have a compute farm and are looking to deploy
> over a thousand instances to serve as compute nodes. You bought into
> the idea of having a hybrid cloud and plan to deploy most of the
> instances on a private cloud and in the event you need to speed up
> processing to meet deadlines, you would like to increase your
> throughput by bringing up nodes on a public cloud.
> 
> How well do the tools we have built meet that goal? Sure we can
> build and launch the instances from the Conductor UI. But if you're
> managing thousands of instances, the UI is likely not the tool you
> would be using primarily. If you're managing large number of
> instance you'll likely have your own tools to automate launching of
> instances if you see your throughput is not meeting set targets. We
> have recognized this as a limitation with Conductor and the recent
> focus on the api is good to see. But I think this is the type of
> analysis we should be doing.
> 
> To continue with the example, your environment would be heavily
> scripted. If an instance crashes, you would have scripts to
> automatically cleanup and relaunch. If it fails continously, ideally
> the system would be smart enough to alert you if a particular host
> is a trouble spot and it be placed offline for analysis (wishful
> thinking). For each instance, you would also like to have access to
> metrics like cpu, disk, and network utilization. These metrics would
> help you flag instance for analysis that aren't being fully utilized
> or at imminent risk of crashing; say your compute process hangs or
> servers who run the risk of crashing either from high load or low
> disk space.
> 
> To minimize cost, if more nodes on your private cloud are becoming
> idle because the jobs are finishing faster, you would like to know
> which ones and how many so that you can divert processing back
> internally and off of the public cloud and shut down instances on
> the public cloud.
> 
> What happens if a cloud provider goes offline? Can I script my way
> out of trouble? I like to be alerted when that happens so I don't
> send more compute requests to instances on that provider.
> 
> I think we are a good way there to meet the requirements for this
> user scenario. What we lack is ways to get metrics, provider state,
> and instance state information through an api to allow scripting.
> 
> Now that we have released a product, hopefully, we'll start to get
> more feedback on exactly what a customer is looking for. But in
> absence of such feedback, I think it would be useful for us to
> develop scenarios on our own like the one above in anticipation of
> how users would likely use aeolus. This would help to put more focus
> on what we develop.
> 
> Once we develop a portfolio of these scenarios, I think it will make
> it easier for us to explain why and how you should use aeolus and
> give users a better feel on its usefulness if they adopt this
> platform. aeolusproject.org explains what aeolus does, but it
> doesn't argue for why or how one would use aeolus.

This is a fantastic idea Richard, and your comment on the website is
dead right.

What we want to do is get folks using what we have and what we
continue to develop in the API area particularly, so that we can have
some level of confidence that we are building something people will
want to use. Putting some scenarios together that show people how we
think they can use the software will help a lot.

--H



-- 
== 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



More information about the aeolus-devel mailing list