[User-committee] [Openstack] Formulate application developer oriented questions for the user survey

Everett Toews everett.toews at RACKSPACE.COM
Fri Jan 17 20:09:23 UTC 2014


On Jan 17, 2014, at 5:45 AM, Gregor von Laszewski wrote:

> Everett:
> 
> you may want to add a question such as  
> 
> 	* “Why did you use this  library?”

That's a good point. One of the things that concerns me about how the questions are worded right now is that they are very reactionary. That's great for finding out the current state of thing but does nothing to inform us on where users want to go in the future and how we can help them get there.

They're more "What are you using right now?" not "What will you need in the future?" 

Asking why will also help reveal requirements. Personally I need to think on this a bit more and take another crack at the questions later.

> This may give an additional insight and possibly motivation for further actions/development. Some examples 
> 
> a) in Python the use of libcloud via the EC2 is popular. Why?: compatibility
> 
> b) in the  cloudmesh project we developed our own compatibility library that makes use of the native openstack protocol instead of using lib cloud/EC2 to access openstack. Why: (1) libcloud/EC2 has limited functionality, (2) debugging of production clouds with native protocols (starting thousands of vms), (3) easier integration into user interfaces while leveraging JSON. (4) Together this allows us to have an API that accesses and manages VMS on AWS, Azure, and Openstack the same way but uses in case of Openstack the native protocol instead of lib cloud/EC2.

Just out of curiosity, why didn't you contribute to the libcloud project to fill in the missing functionality rather than start your own?

Thanks,
Everett




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