Excited about Cockpit

So we had the DevConf conference here in Brno this weekend. One of the projects I am really excited about is Cockpit. Cockpit is a new server administration tool developed by Red Hat engineers which aims at providing a modern looking and userfriendly interface for your servers. There has been many such efforts over the years, but what I feel makes this one special is that it got graphical designers and interface designers involved, to ensure that the user experience is kept in focus instead of being taken hostage by underlaying APIs or systems. Too many such interfaces, be they web based or not tend to both feel and look clunky, for instance sometimes exposing features not because anyone realistically ever would want them, but because the underlying library happen to have a call for it.

Cockpit should also hopefully put the final nail in the coffin for the so called ‘server desktop’. The idea that you need to be able to run a graphical shell using X on your server adds a lot of pain with little gain in my opinion. The Fedora Server product should hopefully become a great showpiece for how nice a Linux server can be to use and configure when you have something like Cockpit available.

There was some nice videos showing what is already in Cockpit shown at the conference so hopefully they will be available online soon. In the meantime I recommend taking a look at the Cockpit web page.

6 thoughts on “Excited about Cockpit

  1. You should integrate the terminal, that Cloud9 uses in their online IDE. Thats really nice.

  2. Finally :) This is often requested feature from users. I know webmin has been ressurected some two years ago, but this looks more polished and supporting all things in RedHat/Fedora/CentOS world.

    I wanted to ask – do you know what will happen with Satellite? Administration is one angle, but there’s need for software distribution and inventory management.

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