Client-side Rendering with OpenStack Horizon and Angular JS

Hello OC Stackers!

Excited to set the topic for our inaugural meeting. This month we welcome David Lapsley, PHD and Director of Engineering at Metacloud. David is an expert in Horizon customization and is the key contributor for the LiveStats feature in the Metacloud UI. ======

Client-side Rendering with OpenStack Horizon and Angular JS

The OpenStack project was launched by Rackspace and NASA in July 2010. Since then it has gained considerable momentum, with over 200 companies joining the project.

The OpenStack Horizon project provides a highly extensible web-based User Interface to OpenStack services. However, in the time since Horizon was first architected, there have been major advances in the design and best practices for web applications. In particular, the use of more sophisticated and robust client-side javascript frameworks have come to the fore. These frameworks provide a much more responsive user experience and much cleaner separation between the client and server. They also enable configuration driven interfaces, facilitate more modular testing, and can facilitate shorter development cycles, more testable software, and above all, a better user experience.

In this presentation, David will share some of our recent work in re-architecting parts of Horizon to take advantage of these new technologies. We will provide a brief introduction of OpenStack and Horizon, describe the recent work we have done, and then delve into architectural details and code examples of our recent work.

Thanks to David and Metacloud for their time, EMC for the meeting space, and Dreamhost for food and beverages. Looking forward to meeting you all...and don't forget to invite your friends and colleagues. Cheers!
Chris