Aeolus Papercuts

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Mon Jun 11 18:51:24 UTC 2012


I hope I'm not opening _too_ big a can of worms here, but I was just
thinking about a handful of things in Aeolus that really annoy me, yet
would probably be pretty easy to fix.

Here's what's on my mind. Please feel free to share your own:

1.) Adding an EC2 account is absurdly complicated if you don't use
aeolus-configure here. You need to name the provider something magical
for you to be able to push images. You also need to set the API_PROVIDER
string to something magical, but seemingly something different. And even
though there's only a finite set of possible values, you can't choose
from a dropdown -- you need to manually enter it.

This is maybe not a priority, since most people will probably use
aeolus-configure. But it seems like we could make this much, much easier
to do through the web GUI than it is today.

2.) Our messaging is really bad in the case that things fail while
building images. Because I apparently used the wrong magic string for
EC2, my attempt to push an image failed. The error I got in the web UI
reads, "Unable to Upload Provider Image." (Yes, with excessive
capitalization.) I had to go to imagefactory.log, and by reading the
stack trace I could piece together what went wrong.

There's actually a whole bunch wrong here. First, the error:

2012-06-11 14:08:49,751 WARNING imgfac.BuildDispatcher.BuildDispatcher
pid(26193) Message: No matching provider found for us-east-1, using
"condorcloud" by default.
2012-06-11 14:08:49,751 DEBUG imgfac.ImageWarehouse.ImageWarehouse
pid(26193) Message: Querying
(http://localhost:9090/target_images/_query) with expression ($build ==
"54e87189-b155-4264-982c-4bcffed405fa" && $target == "condorcloud")
2012-06-11 14:08:49,753 DEBUG imgfac.ImageWarehouse.ImageWarehouse
pid(26193) Message: Image Warehouse returned status (404) with message: 
2012-06-11 14:08:49,753 DEBUG imgfac.ImageWarehouse.ImageWarehouse
pid(26193) Message: Getting metadata (['template']) from
http://localhost:9090/target_images/None
2012-06-11 14:08:49,754 DEBUG imgfac.ImageWarehouse.ImageWarehouse
pid(26193) Message: Image Warehouse returned status (404) with message: 
2012-06-11 14:08:49,755 DEBUG imgfac.ImageWarehouse.ImageWarehouse
pid(26193) Message: Created Image Warehouse instance
http://localhost:9090 - buckets(target_images, templates, icicles,
provider_images)
2012-06-11 14:08:49,755 ERROR imgfac.rest.imagefactory pid(26193)
Message: 'template' must be a UUID, URL, XML string or XML document
path...


What this actually means is essentially "You specified an invalid
provider," but it's not abundantly clear.

Second, this error should come back over the API.

Third, Conductor should collect and display that helpful error, versus
telling people to work their way through imagefactory.log to figure out
what went wrong.

It's not like either of these two things are killer features that will
make a profound difference. But they're both things I think we could put
in an upcoming sprint to make the user experience, well, less
frustrating. But I'm pretty sure these aren't the only two. What other
pet peeves do you think we could pretty trivially address?

-- Matt



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