OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) in Essex Devin Carlen, Project Technical Lead

Founder, Nebula, Inc.@devcamcar

Essex Release Update

Let loose the dogs of core!

As of Essex, Horizon is an officially supported project of the OpenStack eco-system.

‣http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Approved/Incubation

‣Sustainable development process

‣Grow the core team of contributors

‣Establish a user base

‣Mature the project technically

‣Integrate with OpenStack release management and milestones

Metrics

The Horizon project gained a lot of support from the community during the Essex release.

‣51 contributors (up from 17 in Diablo)

‣36 blueprints implemented (up from 13 in Diablo)

‣377 bug fixes (up from 41 in Diablo)

Core Incubation Process

So, why is Horizon a core project?

‣ Having a standard user interface is important.

‣ Really, really important.

‣ Having a way to visualize OpenStack makes it tangible and accessible to a much wider audience.

‣ This drives adoption.

“Bend me, shape me, anyway you want to.”‣ Horizon is an “unopinionated” implementation.

‣ Large scale deployments are usually re-branded and extended with deployment specific feature sets.

‣ Therefore, we can use Horizon for a number of use cases:

‣ Enterprises

‣ Small businesses

‣ Service providers

‣ Developers

Bad user experience:

Better user experience!

What can we learn from history?

‣ Amazon learned that providing UIs for new features dramatically improved the adoption rate.

‣ Based on this, Amazon modified its entire engineering process to focus on only launching new features when the UI was also finished.

‣ Scaling UI engineering is hard.

Who’s responsible for what?

‣ Having just had our first official release, we are still among the smallest communities.

‣ Our job is not to build everyone’s UI.

‣ Our job is to provide a pluggable and extensible framework for building UIs.

‣ Our job is to provide a clear foundation for what semantics, metaphors, and elements are used.

Essex Features Overview

Highlights

‣ New extensible architecture enabling a wide variety of use cases

‣ Human Interface Guidelines document

‣ New visual design

‣ Full integration with all core projects

‣ Official release notes at:http://horizon.openstack.org/releases/2012_1.html

Better feature support for Nova

‣ Volume snapshots

‣ Boot from volume

‣ Realtime updates of instance status

‣ Pause / suspend instances

‣ Instance power state

‣ Manage floating IP allocation.

Client side architecture update

‣ Horizon now uses Bootstrap, a client side development framework recently open sourced by Twitter.

‣ http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

‣ Lightweight Javascript based toolkit that enables rich client side interaction models

Bootstrap makes us nimble

Human Interface Guidelines

‣ UX source of truth

‣ Contains:

‣ Principles

‣ Core Architecture

‣ Core Elements

‣ Example Screens

‣ Visual Design Language (WIP)

Proposed Design Process

‣ Blueprints with designs

‣ UX

‣ Visual

‣ Building the design community

‣ Clear and open process

Folsom Roadmap

Evolving in real time…

‣ We’re here to discuss the roadmap this week, so it’s still evolving.

‣ Themes so far:

‣ Dynamic workflow support

‣ Make Quantum a first class citizen

‣ Major improvements for Swift support

‣ RBAC management

Thank you!

Moving forward!

‣ Special thanks to my team at Nebula, the folks at DeltaCloud, Rackspace, and everyone else who helped make the Essex release of Horizon great!

‣ Feedback is welcome! Please add feature requests and ideas to the official Launchpad page:

‣ http://launchpad.net/horizon

‣ We look forward to a great Folsom release!