1. OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) in Essex
Devin Carlen, Project Technical Lead
Founder, Nebula, Inc.
@devcamcar

2. Essex Release Update

3. 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
‣

4. 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)
‣

5. Core Incubation Process

6. 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.

7. “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

8. Bad user experience:

9. Better user experience!

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Essex Features Overview

13. 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

14. 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.

15. 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

16. Bootstrap makes us nimble

17. Human Interface Guidelines
‣ UX source of truth
‣ Contains:
‣ Principles
‣ Core Architecture
‣ Core Elements
‣ Example Screens
‣ Visual Design Language (WIP)

21. Proposed Design Process
‣ Blueprints with designs
‣ UX
‣ Visual
‣ Building the design community
‣ Clear and open process

23. Folsom Roadmap

24. 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

25. Thank you!

26. 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!