deploying bundle to a single platform

John Mazzitelli mazz at redhat.com
Tue Jun 21 21:18:34 UTC 2011


This email is regarding a convenience feature that some asked about.

Right now, bundle deployments require you to deploy to a group of 
resources, not a single resource. In other words, even if you want to 
deploy a bundle to a single resource, you still need to have that 
resource in a group and deploy to that single-member group.

So the thought is, for demo purposes, or for small production 
environments, can we have it where you do not need to create that group 
and just deploy to a single resource?

Here's my thoughts.

First, the data model strictly requires bundle deployments to be 
associated with groups. Without some major surgery, we can't change the 
data model to support groups AND single resources (and all the 
server-side business logic that would go along with that).

So, the thinking is, can we just have some convenient way to select a 
single resource but then we create a group under the covers and use that 
hidden group to do the deployment. Thus freeing up the user from having 
to create the group, but still managing to be able to deploy the bundle 
using the same implementation we have today.

The problem with that is the UI workflow. I can't think of "convenient" 
place to do this, without asking the user to do just as complex a 
workflow as he is being asked today.

For example, in the deploy wizard's "create destination" step, we have a 
drop down to select a group. We would have to have some kind of other UI 
component to select a single resource. Suppose we have that. I select a 
resource. What would be the group's name? Whatever group is created will 
show up in the list of groups in other places in the UI, so we'd like to 
ask the user to name it - but that means we'd have to popup some dialog 
box to ask for the name. If that's the case, why don't we just ask him 
for the rest of the group info - like description. In fact, this kind of 
thing does now exist. Specifically, the deploy wizard provides a "+" 
button that actually pops up the full "create group wizard".  So here 
you can enter the name your new group, provide a description and select 
your one resource, hit OK and continue the deploy wizard - your new 
group will show up in teh group drop down that you can select (one 
enhancement would be for us to pre-populate the group drop down with the 
new group you created, I didn't do that but we should).

I suppose we could give it a default name and not popup the group wizard 
(thus we create the group under the covers) but I'm not sure how this is 
different (from a UI workflow perspective) from popping up the group 
wizard. We still need to ask the user for SOMETHING - either they select 
the resource from "some" other component in the deploy wizard or they do 
so from the group create wizard. Either way, they need to go into some 
UI component to select a resource. But without the group wizard, they 
have no way of assigning their group their own custom name.

If we assign our own default name under the covers, since the user 
doesn't know that we are creating a group, it will seem odd that he sees 
this strangely named group that he didn't knowingly create appear in his 
group list (say, if he goes to Inventory>AllGroups). And this will only 
show up the next time he goes and looks at the group list somewhere 
(which may not be for a while yet - so as time passes, he may not 
connect or associate his act of deploying the bundle to the existence of 
this new group).

So there are two things here I do not like with respect to this request:

1) the UI workflow will not be significantly simpler for the user. The 
user will need to select the individual resource from SOMEWHERE. That 
somewhere is either in a UI component directly on the deploy wizard or 
in the Group Create Wizard.

2) without going through some kind of group-creation workflow (that is, 
we create the group under the covers once the user selected the 
individual resource), we will be forced to give a default name to this 
group we create under the covers. The user will then possibly be 
confused later on when he sees this oddly named group in his list of 
groups - something in which he didn't create, he didn't name, and quite 
possible won't know why it is created.

If we DO ask the user to give us a name, why not popup the group create 
wizard itself? Not much different and at least the group create wizard 
is a common component the user should be used to and provides more 
capability.

Those are my thoughts on the subject. Feel free to chime in. Especially 
with ideas on how you think this can be done and make it easier for the 
user to deploy to a single resource that is significantly better than 
how it works today.

John


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