A branching-out suggestion: virt-manager for cloud

Jozef Zigmund jzigmund at redhat.com
Mon Apr 8 14:03:58 UTC 2013


Hi all,

On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 16:30 -0400, 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.

+1, because why not
> 
> It could just be a GUI client for Deltacloud. Maybe Qt, as Nitesh's 
> specialty.

I've checked the code and I'd like to try playing with QtQuick[3]. I
feel that it could be great opportunity to have some real app for use it
there and have a fun with it.

> 
> 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. 

+1

> 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/

The truth is that the functionality is overlapping WM project's
functionality. Still the difference, that can attract "other" type of
people, that doesnt want to run N-# of web-based apps, can be target of
desktop app.

If desktop app hit some community support, it can help to improve UX in
WM also.

@matt: does 'aeolus-gui' exist as the package for fedora ?

[3] http://qt.digia.com/Product/qt-quick/



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