Well, it has been a ride! :)
Cardinal has been an awesome learning experience. It's overwhelming to think there's still much more to learn! Recently, I found the universe steering me in another direction. Instead of working on network automation/cloud components, I'm starting to really dive into creative technologies. Technologies like Krita and Blender, which allow artists to tell stories and provide a platform for 2D/3D animation, have been my primary focus lately. In order to build a foundation of knowledge with those technologies, I need to reallocate my time and trim some projects, like Cardinal/scout.
I'm very happy that people from all over the world use Cardinal. I think having an open source Cisco access point controller is still a valid use case, even in today's landscape. Technologies like Ansible and Meraki are out there, but for those who want to leverage a 100% open source dashboard/API solution, I'm happy to say Cardinal exists! :)
Thank you very much to everyone who's contributed to Cardinal! Thank you to everyone who:
Opened issues
Pull requests
Spread the word about Cardinal (through platforms like Reddit)
Cloned/starred the repos!
I'm sorry to all who experienced problems with Cardinal and didn't get the attention/answers they needed. This project, for the most part, has been a one person show. That's why I'm exceptionally grateful to the handful of Cardinal contributors who have helped patch code, test functionality, and report issues.
With that said, I'm looking for maintainers who might want to take over the project. Here are some things I was aiming to accomplish in Cardinal v3.0:
Implementing a real, RESTful API structure
Incorporating Redis/rq for asynchronous work
Improve the parallel operations for AP groups
Deploying a testing environment for scout/Cardinal operations
Continue on the path to making Cardinal cloud-native (e.g. Kubernetes)
Looking beyond, I think Cardinal would be better if structured using an ORM like Flask-SQLAlchemy. Objects are built out by hand, which is not great. It's ok for now, but if the platform continues growing, things are going to get more messy. Maybe Cardinal would be better designed with Django? Maybe scout
should be replaced with Ansible? There are a lot of options out there.
If you're interested in maintaining the Cardinal repos, please feel free to leave a comment here :)