
Our way to rethink PaaS with devops automation - tbronchain
http://www.visualops.io
======
roeme
An interesting approach; I'm however skeptic as to how well DevOps lends
itself to be visualized. And even if the techniques and products do now,
futures ones may not, or require a lot of work to bring into this.

 _> VisualOps is created with a goal of both "easy to understand" and "total
control"._

I don't know, this seems almost too ambitious to me. I'm wary of car
analogies, but alas: While everyone can drive a car, does this yet qualify as
"total control"? Assuming I'd like to control everything about my engine -
resulting in a shitload of controls on my dashboard, is that car still easy to
understand (to me yes, to my mum, - or a newcomer for that matter - doubtfully
so)? And by hiding the additional controls behind a "ADVANCED CONTROLS" cover
kinda defeats the "easy to understand" part, how soon until HOWTO's appear
whose first instruction is to lift said cover?

I'm sure there are boatloads of loopholes in my analogy, but you get the
general idea. Not really sold on the concept, but if somebody can offer
insightful comments, I might be convinced. Not easily though.

 _> Complicated data format Even if someone hacked into our servers, took a
copy of the data, stole our soure code or laptop, they still cannot get your
information._

Remove this sentence ASAP. It's an insult to everyone with at least a basic
grasp on good IT and security principles. wtf; just because it's supposedly
_complicated_ a determined adversary cannot break the code?

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michaelmior
I missed that sentence, but agreed that it should be removed. I don't think
"complicated data format" is a good selling point. Quite the opposite really.

~~~
tbronchain
Hi Michael, We are not sure what you means by "I don't think "complicated data
format" is a good selling point.", could you tell us more? Thanks!

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michaelmior
The FAQ suggests that the fact you use a complicated data format is a good
thing and beneficial to security. I really doubt this is true.

~~~
tbronchain
Right, we have modified this part. By "complicated data format", we actually
meant strong encryption algorithm. Sorry for the confusion.

~~~
roeme
Reading this, and skimming over your other comments I suspect that english
isn't really your first or second language...consider asking a friend with a
english cert above FCE level to help you out with translations. No need for a
professional service, but a wee bit better than currently might help you.

Because...between "complicated data format" and "strong encryption algorithm",
there are not just worlds, but universes. Subsequently, this correction also
sounds suspicious to somebody who assumes you are fluent in english (or is
used to it).

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tbronchain
We'll do, thanks for the advice :)

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devonkim
There's a ton of software that's been built to do a lot of this in the really
unsexy / "not very hot at all" enterprise software space with the sticker
label of cloud provisioning / application deployment automation where everyone
has spent a long time trying to visualize deploying groups of machines out to
suit their oftentimes not very technical stakeholders (yes, DC managers that
aren't actually that technical is extremely common in the Fortune 500).
Examples: VMware vCloud Director + VCOps + Orchestrator, CA's AppLogic, and
even HP's Cloud Service Automation. All of these are directly in the value
proposition category of "automate your provisioning and monitoring / ops of
your systems." Almost all of them involve some form of a visual programming
language with drag 'n drop capabilities just the same as your UI shows and
with the usual hallmarks of small DSLs that creep into the components.

I have to ask where you guys think you fit into the market between start-up
style home-grown devops stacks (expensive in labor and time instead of capex)
and these 7-figure products (capex-heavy, but OOTB solution in theory) when so
much has already been done and acquired away by pretty much every large
software vendor.

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tbronchain
I agree the concept isn't totally new, and has been seen somewhere else.
However, despite of various feature differences, we think we made the efforts
to distinguish ourselves in two parts: 1. we try very hard to simply the
process to define a complex, multi-tier template; 2. VisualOps is a service,
not an editor or designing tool. we continuously managed your app once
launched to make sure it runs in the defined state.

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stephenr
Isn't this whole approach based on the (imho wrong) idea that "DevOps" means
developers [trying] to manage servers/infra?

IMO DevOps is about smarter Ops using "development" (i.e. automation,
reproducible system config systems) rather than ad-hoc management of
individual servers.

To me this reminds me a lot of some MongoDB fans - they have no real _need_
for Mongo, they just don't want/know how to define a usable schema for a
relational DB.

~~~
tbronchain
Hi Stephen, Very interesting comment here. We do think that DevOps has
different definitions, and in our opinion, none is really wrong, as all comes
back to the same idea. Let me explain this. DevOps is all about reducing the
gap between development and operations. This is done allowing "smarter ops" to
use "development", but also helping developers to realise some operations.
VisualOps is made for both sides. We hope that VisualOps could help developers
who don't want to spend too much time on operations, but also, we created
VisualOps to act like a programmable configuration manager (like Chef, Puppet
...).

~~~
stephenr
I understand your point but personally a developer who wants more control over
operations, but isn't able/willing to learn to write recipies/config
packages/what-have-you and relies on a visual tool like this is going to raise
alarm bells for me.

~~~
roeme
A developer relying on (current) visual tools isn't really a developer to me
anyway. But I'm totally willing to give in here; the idea of visual
programming has been around longer than me (search wikipedia for a start), and
let's not forget that in digital circuitry visual tools are used (and _are of
use_ ) a lot.

~~~
tbronchain
Indeed! Visual tools makes the approach more "human". Simplified tools don't
mean dummy tools. It's actually the total opposite: a developer forced to do
deal with Ops is less likely to do some mistakes using a simpler tool, than
trying to deal that things that he doesn't (and doesn't want to) understand. I
understand the other point of view, that we better start by learning the most
complicated things (I've started to learn programming with C and ASM, although
I'm a 90s guy), and the whole challenge we have with VisualOps is to make the
learning and usage easier, without breaking the knowledge.

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zimbatm
Makes me think of [https://jujucharms.com/](https://jujucharms.com/)

~~~
gnawux
Similar by some means, from my point, visualops.io is closer to AWS VPC
resources.

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rpedela
I am a developer who needs to do AWS sysadmin sometimes and does not have the
time to learn Chef, Puppet, etc. So I think I am a target user and I like the
concept. I tried it and find it very hard to use.

* Hints or error messages appear in the top banner. This is not obvious. If you moved the messages closer to where I am looking, that would be more helpful. You could simply move the message to the middle of the screen or in some cases pop-up a tooltip next to the component that has the error or hint. It also does not help that the news banner is a similar color to the error message box.

* It is not clear what the blue, green, etc arrows and squares mean. I tried hovering to see if a tooltip appeared with a short description but none did. I think the blue arrows are for networking, but not totally sure.

* I have no clue how to connect any of my instances to the public internet gateway or even if I can. I tried connecting an instance directly and I also tried using an LB.

I don't know if any of my UI suggestions are correct so please take them with
a grain of salt. Just trying to give possible ideas that may help. Like I
said, I like the concept and I think it has potential. But I think a lot more
work is necessary to make it easy to use.

~~~
tbronchain
Thank you for your comments! We will consider them and try to improve our UI
this way. Also, we are working on the realisations of video tutorials, which
may help the comprehension during the learning phase.

~~~
x3c
You're missing the most important part of networking with your potential
customers. Provide a contact point to the potential customer where he can get
help in setting up the instance _today_. It's good that you're incorporating
his feedback but why not ask him to contact you and help him set up on your
platform. Just a suggestion.

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samstave
This is interesting, but I already have a rather complex app deployed at a
fairly large scale and complexity.

I would like too be able to have a tool that will diagram out my infra from
access to my AWS console though, that would be interesting. [[EDIT: It looks
like it does this.. Ill check out that function just to see what it produces]]

I think this wil work for smaller, less complex implementations/apps, though.

WRT to @roeme's comment > __ _skeptic as to how well DevOps lends itself to be
visualized_ __, though; have you seen StackDriver.com?

I swear by it - its farking fantastic for getting visibility into the
performance of our cloud.

~~~
tbronchain
Indeed =) we do provide this functionality. Import as stack/app isn't possible
yet, but is in progress. About StackDriver.com, we'll have a look about this!

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maslam
Nice tool. I think it gives a good starting point to understand common
topologies ... but beyond that ... I am not sure.

Also, does it export templates to CloudFormation? I'm wary of using a SaaS to
manage my infrastructure if it doesn't give me a way to revert to core AWS
services.

~~~
tbronchain
Mi Maslam. Indeed, VisualOps is a good starting point to understand common AWS
topologies. However, it goes much further! In fact, VisualOps allows you to
configure the software layer of your AWS instances, directly from the IDE! It
allows you to define which packages you want on which instance, their
configuration, the sources repositories, the scripts to launch, and so on! -
Yes, you can export VisualOps stacks to CloudFormation templates.
Unfortunately, doing this, the configuration management won't be possible.

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zoidb
What exactly is used under the covers for provisioning the AWS resources,
cloudformation? If so is it possible to export the cloudformation template
after resources are created in the gui? I could see this being extremely
useful if that's the case.

~~~
tbronchain
We use a custom version of Boto (AWS Python API) to provision AWS resources.
However, yes, it is possible to export your stacks as CF templates.

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volume
Would be interesting to hear from them on the rationale of why they chose Salt
stack compared to puppet, chef or ansible. I figure they must have given it a
good analysis since it seems to be a heavy part of what VisualOps/Madeiera is
about.

~~~
tbronchain
Indeed, this has been a hard decision to make! There are several reasons
behind this choice. 1- We think SaltStack is actually taking the right
approach of configuration management. Their "states" are easy to understand,
and the users don't waste time trying to figure out what does what. 2- We did
have thought about Ansible (similar about 1- idea), but their "distribution"
approach is different. Indeed, Ansible uses SSH to configure the remote hosts
and not a dedicated agent. This is not the was we wanted to take the problem
(we are providing or own backend, and using salt only on the agent-side). 3-
Even if the technology isn't doing the product, Salt is written in Python. We
love Python, and it helped us a lot to integrate their engine in our agent.

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gabrtv
The idea behind PaaS is to abstract away underlying infrastructure. Here it
seems users are managing servers, load balancers and interconnects directly.
While very cool, this style of automation is a far cry from PaaS.

~~~
tbronchain
We think that there is a huge gap between IaaS platforms and PaaS platforms,
that had to be filled. PaaS solutions have their users, IaaS also, but many
people want to get the ease of use of PaaS services without their restrictions
and the customisations possibilities of IaaS solutions without their
configuration complexity. VisualOps is aimed to fit to those people, giving a
human approach to IaaS solutions.

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teepo
This is very similar to the BlueMix beta from IBM on SoftLayer.
[https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/](https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/)

~~~
tbronchain
We will have a look at this, thanks!

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avalaunch
Just a quick FYI, on the iPhone, your logo is on top of the nav links making
it impossible to open the blog and really hard to click on about or
documentation.

~~~
tbronchain
Thanks for comment! We'll fix this ASAP.

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mediascreen
Brilliant! This is how I (a developer "forced" to manage a few servers) always
wished Puppet would work.

~~~
tbronchain
Thanks! Don't hesitate to contact with us if you have any question.

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Patrick_Devine
Will this work with Spot instances? I looked through the documentation but
didn't see it mentioned anywhere.

~~~
tbronchain
Hi Patrick, unfortunately, I'm afraid not at the moment. This is in our
roadmap though, stay in touch ;)

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bender80
Cool concept.

Question - Why not use cross account IAM roles instead of asking for API keys?

~~~
tbronchain
We allow you do use IAM roles to give us access to your AWS account, as
explained in the documentation ([http://docs.visualops.io/source/getting-
started/aws.html](http://docs.visualops.io/source/getting-started/aws.html))

~~~
bender80
What I am seeing is a straight IAM Role. I meant cross account, so visualops
AWS account will be given permission.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/cross-
acct-a...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/cross-acct-
access.html)

~~~
tbronchain
Cross account IAM access is on our roadmap. You can vote for it on our public
roadmap board: [https://trello.com/b/wQdmsmp0/madeira-
idea](https://trello.com/b/wQdmsmp0/madeira-idea)

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mikemajzoub
beautiful website. want to help you out with a typo i spotted: at the bottom
with Ensure, runing should be running.

~~~
tbronchain
Thanks for letting us know! We'll fix this ASAP.

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nickstinemates
Your homepage is delightful.

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tbronchain
Thanks you! =)

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frannk
this is what i am looking for.

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tbronchain
Thanks Frank! Glad we can help =)

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newthinker
amazing

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tbronchain
Thanks!

