Aeolus Developer Conference Report. ACKS REQUIRED BY NOV 13.

Mo Morsi mmorsi at redhat.com
Wed Nov 14 15:38:05 UTC 2012


On 11/14/2012 09:00 AM, Scott Seago wrote:
> On 11/13/2012 05:05 PM, Mo Morsi wrote:
>> On 11/13/2012 10:05 AM, Scott Seago wrote:
>>> On 11/13/2012 08:53 AM, Mo Morsi wrote:
>>>> Responded privately, but Hugh suggested I send it to the general
>>>> list so
>>>> here it is
>>>>
>>>> On 11/10/2012 05:37 AM, Hugh Brock wrote:
>>>>> * We split into teams, each of which came back with a proposed Aeolus
>>>>>     mission statement. After much discussion we refined the four
>>>>>     proposals into one which reads:
>>>>>
>>>>>     "Aeolus mission: to provide superior tools and workflows for
>>>>> flexible
>>>>>     construction, management, and monitoring of multi-instance
>>>>> systems
>>>>>     across clouds."
>>>> Can we remove the words 'superior' and 'flexible'? IMO they don't add
>>>> much.
>>>>
>>>> Also are we just focusing on 'multi-instance systems'? Isn't providing
>>>> simple tools to build images and launch a single instance against any
>>>> generic cloud provider part of Aeolus?
>>> Yes, this came up in our discussions at the conference too. The
>>> difficulty is that it quickly starts to get awkward when you start
>>> adding a bunch of "or" clauses -- "single or multi-instance..." My
>>> take is that, it's easy enough to assume that if you can handle
>>> multi-instance systems, the degenerate case where "number of instances
>>> == 1" is clearly included too.
>> This isn't clear in the "multi-instance systems across clouds" mission
>> statement. Forgetting instances, deployments, everything else, the end
>> user is going to see "multi" and think: multi > 1.
>>
>> We have to look at the mission statement from the perspective of a
>> completely new potential user who is encountering the website for the
>> first time.
>>
>>    -Mo
>>
>>
> Hmm. OK, I guess to me it's fairly clear that if we can handle >1, we
> can handle 1 too, but I have no real objections to mentioning both, if
> it can be done in such a way that everyone agrees to the wording. What
> is essential, though, is that we do mention multi-instance systems,
> since that's a huge part of what we do. In other words, by all means
> lets make it clear that we handle "one or more instances" -- but not
> at the expense of not making it equally clear that we handle complex
> multi-instance systems well.
>
> Scott
>

I would argue the opposite. If its clear we can do 1 instance well, > 1
is easily seen as a matter of parallelizing it after that. Most popular
projects take the philosophy of doing one simple thing, but doing that
thing really well.

Our most successful components up to this point take that approach.
Deltacloud provides a generic cloud computational api, imagefactory
provides a generic cloud image api, oz provides in-instance
bootstrapping support, etc.


Cutting to the chase, for Aeolus to be successful one of two things
needs to happen:

* we go back to the drawing board, develop more simple command line
tools not dependent on external resources (other than the cloud
providers themselves) to accomplish the goals we've been trying to
achieve at this point. We develop these tools w/ specific communities in
mind, addressing their cloud related needs.

* we offer our current stack as a hosted service (even if its just
internal for the time being). Obviously this entails alot of
complexities, but if we choose this route, we need to start working
towards it (if we can't host our own thing, who is going to host our
stuff on their network)

My vote is for the former, but would be fine w/ the later. All the
developers should weigh in as your time and efforts is at stake here. If
anyone has an additional solution please present it, but justify how it
would grow the visible user base more quickly than those already
presented as that is the most important factor here.

  -Mo





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