[OOTB-hive] Thoughts on Honeycomb that need your input

[Nick Burch]

Hi Jeff

I should probably prefix this with the fact that the events of been to 
lately, and the people I've chatted to, may not be representative of 
likely new Honeycomb users...


On Thu, 16 Jun 2016, Jeff Potts wrote:
> *1. Honeycomb should be Alfresco Community Edition plus the best of what
> the community has to offer.*

As a vision, that makes sense to me.

> We also need to be transparent about exactly what is included.

I'd say including where it all came from, how to help fix bits, and how to 
turn it off!


> *2. Honeycomb should be available to consume in at least as many flavors 
> as Alfresco Community Edition is.*

I'm not sure about that. I'd lean more towards "should be easy to consume" 
and "should target those interested in using an open-source ECM, and those 
interested in helping expand it".

> Regarding the second point, there has been a lot of hard work done to 
> Puppet-ize the Honeycomb installation. That is great, we don't want to 
> stop doing that. For people who have Puppet in their environments or are 
> willing to introduce it, using Puppet to automate the install has a lot 
> of value.

2 years ago, lots of people I spoke to were using puppet for everything. 
Today, the "buzz" seems to be around containers, especially for trying 
things out. I've come across quite a few people who try and develop with 
containers, then use the likes of puppet to manage production roll-out. 
It's been a while since I met anyone who said "when I want to try 
something new, I go looking for puppet/chef/ansible rules to deploy my 
trial instance"

Back when Alfresco was just getting started, one-click installers were the 
big thing for letting people easily try it out. I doubt many production 
installs were done with the installer, but a large number of people trying 
it for the first time found it convenient and most-easy to get started. 
(The people in engineering maintaining it much less so...). These days, it 
seems that "spin up a container" or "spin something up in the cloud" seem 
to be the more popular "I wonder what that's like, can I quickly try it" 
route.

When it comes to containers, Docker seems to have the big edge right now, 
though that may change with time. Orchestration frameworks (for deploying 
multiple inter-linked containers) there still seems to be a big 
fight/debate going on, so a single container with everything in might be 
safest even if it offends the microserves crowd!

So, my suggestion would be:
  * General instructions on building a container image
  * Docker image (frequently refreshed due to various issues with how
    containers work and age...)
  * Links to tutorials on how to spin up the docker image locally and on
    Amazon (free instances available to all) and on Azure (free instances
    given away to most Microsoft customers one way or another)
  * War files for more advanced users
  * Deployment scripts (eg puppet) for advanced users
  * Build steps + scripts + instructions for converting users to
    contributors

> But we also want to make it an easy choice for people. Today there is a
> WAR-only distribution of Alfresco CE. There should be a WAR-only
> distribution of Honeycomb. Today there is an installer distribution of
> Alfresco CE. There should be an option to install Honeycomb with that same
> installer.

Having helped a bit with that installer, and having seen how many users 
today seem to want to try things out, I'd run very very quickly away from 
any suggesting to have anything to do with the installer!

Nick