[ProgSoc] Web-panel options - too much choice, dang it

jedd jedd at progsoc.org
Wed Dec 16 08:51:44 EST 2009


 Howdi,

 Relatively easy question for the cognoscenti.

 I'm looking for a web panel / dashboard app to run some
 reasonable number of concurrent web apps - providing
 some autonomy and isolation within each environment for
 an organisation with lots of untrusting departments.  So a bit
 ISP-like, but within a closed, decently spec'd network where
 I have lots of control over the gear & network connections.  Of
 course this is unlikely to change the usual criteria, I suppose.


 I have two additional requirements:

 The ability to plug-in some non-vanilla applications (beyond
 the usual CMS, webmail, MySQL suspects) - ideally banging
 away at doing some real or fake single-sign-on to those apps.
 I'm sure most suites are extensible, but it's a matter of how much
 pain is involved in doing the extensificationary activities.

 Scalability - doing this on the cheap, so an ESX cluster is out ;(
 Probably looking at HA, perhaps next to a MySQL cluster or MySQL's
 Proxy front end.  Details .. details.  The ineluctable fact is that
 I have no idea how you scale some dozens of departments to
 have their own virtual 'enclosure', while still being able to shuffle
 them about in response to scheduled outages or just normal growth.
 ESX's vMotion ability would be perfect - but apart from cost, the
 overhead of managing all those full-sized VM's just blows the idea
 out of the water.


 My thoughts so far ...

 cpanel and ensim and so on are out of our league - primarily
 due to cost, partly because it becomes more complex to start
 faffing around under the hood.  So GPL is my preference, and
 then working through the various other free-ish licences.

 Gentle preference for PHP, just because I know it, so it would
 be much easier to mod and plug in to - I see that the bulk of apps
 are PHP, Java or (infrequently) Python, so this should be easy.

 Scalability - Do you cluster all your boxes and then float this
 stuff over the top, do any free panel apps actually do this layer
 for you (from what I've read - they don't), or do you just mung this
 scalability up yourself with a bit of DNS (& Apache etc) magic and
 try to limit your department-shuffling to scheduled outage times?

 This link shows the suites I've looked at - specifically the ones
 in the first box that are labelled with an 'Opensource' <sic>
 licence.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_hosting_control_panels


 Desperately in need of any kind of clue here - so any info, gut
 feels, experiences etc are hugely welcome.

 J.



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