Horizon Usage Survey

- 2 mins read

Over the past few weeks, I’ve run a survey that attempts to discover how people use OpenStack’s Horizon (aka openstack-dashboard), and I’d like to publish some preliminary results. I’ll be soliciting responses during the Vancouver Summit next week, so if you haven’t participated yet, you still have time to do so. The link to do so is here: http://tinyurl.com/horizon-usage-survey.

Results

In two weeks, the survey gathered 36 responses. Due to the small sample size and the non-random selection of participants, this data should not be considered statistically significant — Self-selected populations rarely are — however it does provide us with a window into how Horizon is used in the real world.

OpenStack Deployment Statistics

The following are charts that address the scale of our users’ OpenStack deployments.

Horizon Deployment

These charts represent information about Horizon usage.

Horizon Customization

Information about the tools that are used to customize horizon, what parts of horizon are customized, and where Horizon falls short.

What is the one key feature missing from horizon?

This was a free-form question, so I’ve taken the liberty to group the responses into different categories.

Usability and simplified experience

These responses address simplicity and usability in horizon.

  • Customer Facing features that improve and simplify the experience.
  • Masking Networks that cannot be attached to an instance during the instance boot wizard.
  • Simple image panel that only shows latest images, instead of all images.
  • Improved access and usability of horizon’s metrics visualization.
  • Use-friendly instance creation.
Hosted Cloud Features

These seem to be feature requests focused around hosting a cloud provider and selling it as a self-service cloud platform.

  • Self-service project management (Project Admin/Owner, etc).
  • Billing & Pricing integration.
New Features

These appear to be features

  • Approval Automation for Quotas, Tenants, and allocations.
  • Cloud Federation.
    (note: one respondent indicated that they fielded their own user interface because horizon could not talk to other clouds)
Extensibility Improvements
  • Panel Extensions are difficult to manage.
  • No uniform way to import horizon extensions, too many options.
Other

For the sake of completeness, I’ve added features here that are not easily categorized.

  • Invincibility
  • Too many to List