Open Stack

On 2014-09-07 8:14 PM, Monty Taylor wrote:
>
> If I were king ...
>
> 1. Caring about end user experience at all
>
> If I don't do anything at all next cycle, I will see the above fixed.
> Because it's embarrassing. Seriously. Try to use OpenStack from python
> some time. I dare you.
 >
 > [...]
>
> Between 2 and 3, maybe we can make a kilo release that has a net
> negative SLOC count. But, honestly, screw 2 and 3 - let's all just work
> on 1.
>

On 2014-09-08 5:07 PM, James E. Blair wrote:
 >
 > 3) A real SDK
 >
 > OpenStack is so nearly impossible to use, that we have a substantial
 > amount of code in the infrastructure program to do things that,
 > frankly, we are a bit surprised that the client libraries don't do.
 > Just getting an instance with an IP address is an enormous challenge,
 > and something that took us years to get right.  We still have problems
 > deleting instances.  We need client libraries (an SDK if you will) and
 > command line clients that are easy for users to understand and work
 > with, and hide the gory details of how the sausage is made.


I 100% agree with both of you. The user experience is a MAJOR concern 
for us. I'm not a good writer able to articulate my thoughts as good as 
I would like but both Monty and James managed to communicate and 
summarize them.

As a technical person, I often don't see the level of complexity in 
tools I use, I like challenges. I will gladly learn new complex stuff if 
needed. But when I first tried to use OpenStack client libraries, it was 
one of those times where I told myself: wow, it sucks. Especially around 
lack of consistency. Or as Monty said, the number of hoops you have to 
go through just to get a pingable instance. And it was and still is the 
opinion shared by some of my coworkers.

If we could improve this aspect, I would be so happy.

-- 
Mathieu