We’ve done a bit of rethinking about how users would interact with the ACS feature. When going through UI design reviews with @MariSvirik, it seemed that the ACS feature needed to be simplified. While some users may enjoy the freedom of creating custom ACSs and specifying every detail, that could soon become tedious to maintain.
Most users will likely want to take advantage of one of ACSs biggest advantages: having smart proxies download content not from the Satellite, but instead from their respective upstream repositories. We considered adding a button to import all of library as ACSs to make this easier, but that seemed to only add to the complexity.
Therefore, our new ACS idea is to simplify the workflow so that ACSs only need a list of smart proxies and products associated with them. The ACSs will get remote information from the existing repositories. That way it won’t matter if the content is coming from the Red Hat CDN or from custom repositories. RHUI is a bit of a different beast, so it’ll have to be handled with a custom workflow. It’s likely that users will copy/paste or upload a file from RHUI to set up ACSs, which is nearly just as easy.
By having something that is easy to set up without too much thinking, the ACS feature would be more likely to get early adopters. These users could in turn help us figure out other ways to incorporate ACSs into Katello.
Here is what the simplified ACS creation could look like from @MariSvirik:
I’d be curious to hear what people think about this idea. The pro is that it’s easier to use. The con is that it’s less customizable.