Hello everyone,

To help users interact with openstack, we’re currently developing a client-side web tool which enables administrators to manage their openstack cluster in a more efficient and convenient way. (Since we have not named it officially yet, I’m going to call it openstack-admin)

# Introduction

Some may ask, “Why do we need an extra web-based user interface since we have horizon?” Well, although horizon is a mature and powerful dashboard, it is far not efficient enough on big clusters (a simple list operation could take seconds to complete). What’s more, its flexibility of searching could not match our requirements. To overcome obstacles above, a more efficient tool is urgently required, that’s why we started to develop openstack-admin.

# Highlights

Comparing with the current user interface, openstack-admin has following advantages:

• Fast: openstack-admin gets data straightly from SQL databases instead of calling standard openstack API, which accelerates the querying period to a large extent (especially when we’re dealing with a large amount of data).

• Flexible: openstack-admin supports the fuzzy search for any important field(e.g. display_name/uuid/ip_address/project_name of an instance), which enables users to locate a particular object in no time.

• User-friendly: the backend of openstack-admin gets necessary messages from the message queue used by nova, and send them to the frontend using websocket. This way, not only more realistic progress bars could be implemented, but more detailed information could be provided to users as well.

# Issues

To make this tool more efficient and provide better support for concurrency, we chose Golang to implement openstack-admin. As I’ve asked before (truly appreciate advises from Jeremy and Ghanshyam), a project written by an unofficial language may be accepted only if existing languages have been proven to not meet the technical requirements, so we’re considering re-implementing openstack-admin using python if we can’t come to an agreement on the language issue.

So that’s all. How do you guys think of this project?

Thanks,

Douglas Zhang