CloudPortalSpecs

Revision 5 as of 2010-08-02 15:55:45

Clear message

Summary

This specification describes the Ubuntu cloud community portal

Rationale

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) is one of the leading open-source cloud computing software stacks. A lot of engineering effort is going into adding more features into UEC and innovating on top of it. The Ubuntu cloud community portal aims to be the central hub for all the community activities around UEC. The target is to create an easy path for the community to locate information related to UEC, as well as provide easy means for the community to be able to contribute back and engage in a developer path

Use Cases

  • Bob is following the media buzz around cloud computing. He wants to check out what Ubuntu has to offer. Google leads him to visit the Ubuntu cloud portal to locate introductory material and videos introducing what the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is all about
  • Kamal is a cloud expert. He installs UEC in his employer's data center. He faces error messages starting VMs. He would like to check the official documentation. He would also like to post to forums asking for help
  • Daniel works a lot with Ubuntu over EC2. He has written lots of scripts, puppet recipes and created custom AMIs to support easily launching a RoR site. He would like to share those scripts and AMIs with the community, along with a page describing how to use them. He visits the Ubnutu cloud portal, and creates a page describing his tools. He uploads his scripts and AMIs and links to them
  • Natacha is a developer who wants to create a GUI tool for controlling and interacting with UEC. She visits the Ubuntu Cloud Portal, reads the developer getting started section. Registers a new project and starts working. Her project shows up in the projects page on the portal

Design

The Ubuntu Cloud Portal will feature the following main menu

  • Home: Lists all the latest news, blogs, articles. Pointers to newcomers. Latest tweets
  • Documentation: Documentation will present FAQs and a proper collection of UEC information in what we will call as the "UEC Book". The UEC Book will be created from currently available wiki pages on UEC. To avoid documentation duplication and maintaining the same docs in two places, the UEC-Book will be dynamically created from content on the wiki. It will be created using a django application that is integrated with the overall cloud portal. The django application will connect to the moinmoin wiki using its API and dynamically pull out information from specified pages. The pages will be rendered in the cloud portal in an eye pleasing manner such as to blend with the portal theme. The target of representing the information originally available on the wiki a second time on the portal, is two fold. To provide a central hub for everything UEC related. And to provide a lower barrier for entry for someone who might not know much about Ubuntu infrastructure and wiki pages, but who is still interested to learn more about UEC
    • UEC Book: Logical grouping of UEC information, providing a clear documentation path
    • FAQs: UEC FAQs
  • Community
    • Forum: Community Forum cloud sub-forum
    • Mailing Lists: Subscribe to mailing lists
    • Articles: Latest community contributions
    • Tools: Scripts, Puppet recipes, maybe custom AMIs
    • Videos: Tutorials
  • Developer
    • Get Started: How to get involved with UEC
    • Projects: All developer projects related to UEC
  • IRC Chat: Starts a web chat to the Ubuntu cloud channel
  • News: Dedicated listing of latest news

A preview of the front page

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Summary

The Ubuntu Cloud Portal will be created serving the following needs

  • Provide an aggregator service collecting all the latest news, buzz, blogs, tweets...etc around Cloud Computing especially UEC
  • Provide introductory material (tutorials, videos) for community members new to UEC
  • Provide detailed UEC product documentation leveraging the wiki content
  • Provide access to forums enabling users to ask questions. Ideally forums should reflect on the developers' mailing lists
  • Provide a way for community members to easily "Discuss" all topics aggregated from around the web. Threads will be created when users want to discuss an article/blog. The blog itself will receive a trackback
  • Provide a way for community to share their custom scripts, tools, puppet recipes and custom AMIs. Other community members should be able to label, rate, comment on those items

Rationale

This spec is being defined to

  • Attract, educate and engage community members who are new to UEC and cloud computing
  • Keep Ubuntu cloud community members up to date with all the latest news
  • Provide effective documentation and support for community members wanting to use UEC
  • Provide a path for community members to share scripts, tools and to be able to discuss the content made available through the portal

Implementation Plan

Implementation

  • The actual technology/tool to build the portal is not defined. We're evaluating the options
  • Implementation will be split into multiple phases, the first is to include
    • Official Documentation
    • Forum (Most likely hooking into the existing forums.ubuntu.com, and hopefully integrating with mailing lists)

Outstanding Issues

CategorySpec