Barton's Blog

About a month ago I blogged that, with renewed vigor and resources, we were tackling the Project Sputnik Profile Tool – a tool that enables a developer to quickly set up an environment without cluttering up their system. The announcement included a new collaboration with the folks from Docker and a request for feedback from the Community by December 3.

That date has now passed and Peter Owens, who is the project manager for the Profile Tool effort, has collated the feedback and mapped it against our vision for the tool and our minimum requirements.

(When not managing the profile tool effort Peter, as Director of Software Engineering in Dell Services, leads a development team responsible for the delivery of Managed-Private Clouds to global customers and expanding Dell’s OpenStack /DevOps development capability. Peter is based Dell’s Cloud Centre of Excellence in Dublin Ireland.)

Here is Peter’s  summary:

What we’ve learned

It is clear that you believe we are on the right track with the Profile Tool and that our plan to leveraging Docker will allow users to set up environments with minimum impact on system resources.

Where the feedback became very interesting was in the following areas:

1) project lifecycle

We need to define user stories for the following scenarios:

• where the tool is re-run or a project has already been setup by a user
• the project definition is changed
• adding and removing packages
• handling changes to languages or frameworks pulled into a project

2) User specific configurations

• to avoid conflicts, profiles should not be keyed solely on username

3) Specifying language versions

• we need to specify language versions within potentially multi-project environments
• users should be able to specify the language version from within a project

It was generally felt that separating out usernames, packages and config definitions was the correct approach. There were also some useful comparisons with other tools such as Boxen which enables you to centralize your configs for an entire organization. This means a “template” can be created for new hires or groups of developers.

 A Big Thanks and Next Steps

We are very grateful to those who took the time to contribute, share this initiative with their respective communities and provide feedback. Based on the feedback we’ve received we have started working on user story requirements which we hope to have done by the end of the year.  After that we will start coding in January.

As you’d expect we will be using a GitHub central repository where all the code can stay in sync. Code changes will be committed to this and other developers will pull them (sync them to their local repository). To start with we will be providing read-only access to the central repository, so the community will be able to keep track of our progress!  Once we get a little further along we will open up the repository for others to jump in.

Stay tuned and thanks again!

Extra-credit reading

• Dell aims for cloudy orbit with Sputnik Ubuntu developer project – The Register

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 11th, 2013 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.