On 10/26/2012 04:10 PM, Andy Goldstein wrote:
Could you please elaborate on what sort of person is a "non-technical cloud user?" What sort of VMs do you envision them spinning up? Is the thinking that someone else (a "technical" user or an admin) will precreate images that provide services for which the end-user does not need to use SSH or have Linux skills? If so, I'm guessing this would be something like an image that, when started, automatically launches something like Wordpress (or whatever app/site has a good OOTB experience and doesn't require SSH). If not, then I'm not sure there really is a non-technical cloud user.
The example that always comes to my mind is an artist at some animation studio, working on a blockbusting movie.
They spend all day, being all artistic, in 3Ds Max, Maya, or (better yet) Blender, and get to the point where they need to render 5 seconds of cinema-quality animation.
So, they fire up Winged Monkey, a couple of clicks in the gorgeous UI, and they've launched a mini render farm, which probably comes with its own UI.
Another example would by a financial analyst who wants to run Monte Carlo simulations, just to check whether her speculations might tip the global economy into crisis, like last time.
Same thing - fire up winged monkey, a couple of clicks, and they've got a compute cluster.
In both cases, the user isn't technically clueless, but they're not focussed on "the cloud" and aren't required to think too much in order to get the job done.
For these scenarios to work, you someone else has to have come along earlier and created the images, and the application blueprints etc. That work isn't in the scope of Winged Monkey itself. Rather, Winged Monkey is a consumer of the capabilities of the capabilities that the underlying provider presents.
Winged Monkey will work really well, I think, as a consumer of Conductor's front-end APIs.
