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Graffiti

Revision as of 19:30, 4 April 2014 by Travis Tripp (talk | contribs) (Initial use case)

Overview

We love OpenStack and we want to make it more approachable for end users.

We want users to be able to declare the capabilities they want from the system without being technical experts on the nuances of OpenStack, whether this is to launch simple instances or to launch full application stacks with their desired level of service assurance.

We are starting small with the idea that we can demonstrate how we can make even "simple" tasks like launching a VM became even simpler for non-technical users.

At its most basic concept Graffiti is a metadata collaboration tool. Many OpenStack services are great at providing various mechanisms to use metadata in terms of key-value pairs, but collaborating on the actual metadata between developers, admins, services, UI, and end users is largely a disconnected and difficult process that often involves searching outdated wikis, opening source code, and in the best cases making a lot of command line calls. This makes things hard on everybody. We want to make things easier.

Initial use case

The initial use case we are targeting is to improve the launch instance workflow with the following:

  1. Make it easy for users to definitively find the images, snapshots, and volumes that have the software capabilities they need. This is particularly needed in clouds with large numbers of images, snapshots, and volumes.
  2. Once an actual boot source is selected the compatible flavors will be automatically filtered based on its compute requirements.
  3. In addition, we want user to be able to choose their desired service level objectives (SLO) and then automatically filter the flavors that can provide the SLO or completely separate the flavor selection from SLO selection by sending in the correct scheduler hints for the selected SLOs.


An integral part of making the above possible includes improving the image, snapshot, volume, and flavor management UIs to be able to apply the correct metadata across these cloud resources.


Demo

Architecture

Coming soon...

API

Capability Type Management API

Resource Search API

Get Involved

We are still in the very early stages, but we welcome involvement!