A branching-out suggestion: virt-manager for cloud

Tomas Sedovic tsedovic at redhat.com
Mon Apr 8 09:16:48 UTC 2013


On 04/05/2013 10:30 PM, Matt Wagner wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I was chatting a bit with Nitesh earlier today. (He wrote the
> Aeolus-gui[1] app a while back, as you may recall.)
>
> First off, it made me realize that the current situation is probably
> unclear and alienating to people who aren't working on Aeolus full-time.
> We've been talking a bit about whether we want to move away from
> Conductor and in favor of a cloud broker approach, and then we've also
> been talking about leaving Fedora, etc. I think we're moving in the
> right direction and Aeolus will be a better project because of it, but
> I'm not sure things have been made abundantly clear on the list. (Though
> the wiki page helps.)
>
> We were chatting a bit about what would be beneficial to the Aeolus
> project as a whole, and floated the idea of some sort of lightweight
> little app for managing cloud instances. And an idea sort of formed.
>
> I think it would be interesting to build something like virt-manager[2],
> but for managing cloud instances. Nothing fancy, and probably not
> scalable to the enterprise market where people might be managing a
> handful of instances.
>
> It could just be a GUI client for Deltacloud. Maybe Qt, as Nitesh's
> specialty.
>
> I think there are a few reasons this could be pretty neat:
>
> 1.) It's easy to start small and scale up. Grab a list of instances from
> Deltacloud, and let the user pick one to launch, on a given hardware
> profile, and show a list of running instances. Over time, you can work
> in reporting on statistics; disk/network/etc. management, etc.; a VNC
> client where supported.
>
> 2.) You could support multiple providers the same way that virt-manager
> supports multiple hypervisors -- just add multiple, and show them
> separately. You can have a collapsible EC2 section and a collapsible
> OpenStack section in the same app.
>
> 3.) It could be a fun project while we work on figuring out what we're
> doing long-term.
>
> 4.) Most of our plans for an eventual cloud broker involve exposing a
> Deltacloud API in Aeolus, that would transparently map to the ideal
> cloud provider. Thus, this app could work with whatever we end up building.
>
> 5.) Having a lightweight client for whatever we're building would be
> pretty useful, so we wouldn't be constrained to the API-only. And having
> it be a generic client for clouds would emphasize our value-add, versus
> being a heavy monolithic app.
>
> 6.) It might attract a different crowd than "enterprise hybrid cloud"
> attracts. I think that's a good thing, especially upstream. Enterprise
> hybrid cloud management is sort of a niche market. I think there are
> many more people that would be interested in a lightweight little
> desktop GUI for managing cloud instances, but that some of the problems
> we'd be solving overlap a lot. IOW, I think it has potential to grow the
> community, and that this would still translate into building a better,
> more robust enterprise-y management app.
>
> What do you think? Have I gone insane? Would this be a worthwhile endeavor?
>
> -- Matt
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/niteshnarayanlal/Aeolus-gui
> [2] http://virt-manager.org/

While reading this, Winged Monkey came to my mind as well. But if you 
need a more fine-grained access, the Deltacloud's is pretty cool. It 
exposes everything the API does.

Just go to http://localhost:3001/api

Matt, to clarify. Are you asking specifically about a desktop app or 
would a web-based solution suffice?

Thomas


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