On 07/19/2011 05:19 PM, Hugh Brock wrote:
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 04:42:14PM -0400, Matt Wagner wrote:
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 04:17:12PM -0400, Chris Lalancette wrote:
On 07/19/11 - 02:11:26PM, Hugh Brock wrote:
Other UX work
- I think we should be able to launch single images from Conductor without requiring a deployable XML. To make that easier for users, it would be nice if there was some UI for displaying images that are available to launch.
Incidentally, I was going to reply to this very block to suggest that this might also be of use in the sort of use case I've been thinking about lately -- someone who wants to run Conductor to manage a handful of instances, maybe across a couple providers, but who really doesn't want all the overhead that comes with a full-blown setup.
So there's that, too.
I know this is going to make me unpopular, but I think we need to re-instate the UI for building images. As a short-term solution, removing it and going CLI-only removed a roadblock for us, but the immediate reaction of (potential) users when presented with it is revulsion.
Having witnessed this same reaction, I have to agree with Chris here.
Personally, I'd be fine if we started by providing a limited UI, and explained that the command line tools offered more flexibility. But "hand-edit this XML file, run a command-line tool on it to build the image, tail -f the log file and wait for it to finish, and then copy-and-paste that UUID into another command" really didn't go over well at all with the people I showed this to. It works for us, but not the people we're building this for.
Yes, you and Chris were exposed to the full "WTF" of the folks in the training, so I'm not surprised you have that thought.
I would like to challenge one assumption though, which is the whole idea that choosing a base OS and then choosing some packages to be installed on it, *outside the context of a native installer*, is even a useful activity at all in the real world.
So for example, you connect to EC2. EC2 has a million canned AMIs you can choose to launch. I am willing to bet that hardly anyone builds their own AMI for EC2; if they really want to do that EC2 has a great set of tools for it. Would it not be more useful, just from the standpoint of Conductor all by itself, to say "We'll make it really easy for you to browse the images that are already available for you to start in EC2 and then start one" These images include current RHEL and Fedora and Windows images, FWIW?
Similarly, take your local VMWare or RHEV-M installation. Both have a notion of "Templates" -- images that have already been pre-baked and are ready to go. And a lot of real-world installations are going to have a lot of those templates already. Right now it isn't really easy to browse those, but what if it was? Now you have a pretty convenient way to launch things on EC2 and RHEV-M and VMWare from a single pane of glass, and you never had to build *anything* -- from a command line, a UI, or anywhere.
Now of course what we've given up here is the notion of image equivalency -- that you can build something that will be close-enough-to-identical in its EC2 incarnation and its RHEV-M incarnation that people will accept it as such. Having said that, is the value proposition of RHEL not precisely that equivalency -- i.e. that you can launch RHEL on EC2 and it will behave precisely the way RHEL on VMWare or RHEL on RHEV-M behaves? If you the customer are willing to accept that some limited number of JEOSes -- which we could ship and preinstall with Conductor, by the way -- are enough images to suffice, and that you would then use some part of Orchestrator to install packages post-boot or run your own script to install things post-boot... well, then you don't need a template-building UI, because you never have to build a template.
I firmly believe that the reason not having a template building UI is a problem, is because we keep telling people they have to build templates in order to do things. I further think if we want Conductor to be successful, we should fix it so people don't have to build templates unless they really, really want to.
Apologize for the length, but this is a subject I have been thinking about a lot lately.
Please feel free to tell me I'm full of it...
--H
We will get forced into a UI at some point, question is can we survive v1 without it?
If we can't do we have time to get far enough that is does not suck so bad, that no-one uses it?
Carl.