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.
Deployment Size
This is an indication of how many bare-metal instances comprise our user’s clouds.
OpenStack Version
What versions are currently deployed by our users. Note that some deploy multiple clouds.
Cloud Type
The type of cloud gives us an indication of what use cases our users encounter.
Horizon Deployment
These charts represent information about Horizon usage.
What is your UI?
Whether our users use Horizon, a custom-build UI, or both.
Install Tools
What tools do our users use to install and maintain horizon.
Host Operating System
The operating system on which Horizon is installed.
Horizon Customization
Information about the tools that are used to customize horizon, what parts of horizon are customized, and where Horizon falls short.
How did you customize?
There are many ways to customize horizon: Plugins, the Customization Module, creating your own Django Application with horizon as a dependency, or to just maintain your own source fork.
What was changed?
Which parts of Horizon were customized: Templates, Behaviors, Workflows, or more?
Maintained Source
In the case of a Django application, Custom UI, or a Horizon Fork, our users must maintain their own source repository.
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