Before I start, let's recap two words that you may have heard recently if you've been around Ubuntu people. I promise this will be the only jargon in this article.
Juju - a tool that makes it easy to get your solution onto a "cloud"
Charm - a description of that solution, shown as a pretty icon, like this:
Ok, with that out of the way...
I've posted a few times recently about Juju which is in my (slightly biased) opinion, the best and easiest way to get tools that solve real problems deployed onto a "cloud".
But what is a cloud? There are too many definitions out there that unfortunately don't make it any easier for people to visualize what a "cloud" is. And, as if to add insult to injury, a bunch of buzzwords and "thickets of gobbledygook "(1) cloud our understanding of "clouds".
Juju simplifies this immensely. But, what if, as a pure thought experiment, we made the canvas that is presented in Juju and that is designed to show the substrate (or fabric) that the "cloud" is built upon a little more representative of the physical reality? In reality, "clouds" are just collections of computers (and things that connect to computers). Maybe we should attempt to depict some of this.
Admittedly, I'm no 3-D artist, but I love to visualize and do mock-ups. In the spirit of giving humans that are building solutions with Juju a more representative view of their canvas what if we displayed something that looked a little more like this?
In this depiction, computers (and computing resources generally) could be represented roughly to scale as 3-D boxes. Height can represent how powerful they are. area might represent how much they cost, or some other measurement. "Big" resources are easily discernible from "small" resources.
Imaine dragging your Juju Charm onto this canvas and then resizing the Charm to cover the resources that you want it to consume. Grab more "small" resources, or grab some of the "big" ones. (In other words, scale out, or scale up.)
What do you think? Does this idea have merit? Does this make is easier for humans to visualize and to understand the "cloud"?
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(1) I'll write more on "thickets of gobbledygook" later, but now you know my term for it. And, if you're creating these thickets, please cut it out.
Image by author. Please help him improve it ;)