Matthew,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I did not quite make myself clear. I saw this post today and it is more succinct:
Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org
Oct 29 (4 days ago) to jzb, Fedora, server, tamertas On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Joe Brockmeier jzb@redhat.com wrote:
On 10/28/2015 08:21 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
The *could* be the same thing, except cloud-init is terrible and I hate it and if that was the single offering we had for some kind of C&S WG I would cry. I hate it because it is ridiculous to use in a non-cloud environment, and Server very much has that as part of it's reach.
Forking this thread briefly because I think this deserves its own discussion.
I apologize if my rambling wasn't clear on this point. Hopefully this tangent is short-lived.
Is your objection primarily to the concept of cloud-init or the implementation? If it's the concept, not much we can help with there. If it's the implementation...
Well, neither really. Admittedly my use of the Cloud images, and therefore cloud-init, was in attempted to boot it in a VM and log in more like a traditional install for simple test purposes. That didn't work and getting it to the point where I could log in required running some virt-tool thing to modify the image offline. So in the context of "Server & Cloud", where people expect to be able to log in after an install in many cases, cloud-init makes it really hard and is ill-suited to that kind of environment.
Specific to cloud environments, I have no idea if the hassle of getting it setup is the norm or worthwhile. I've been told it is, and I can see where having the infrastructure setup to provide the credentials already in place might make the hassle much less problematic.
(It is also quite possible I hit a bug in the cloud image. I tried running the local setup to provide cloud-init with ssh keys and it didn't work, hence the virt-tool thing. It has been a while since I tried again.)
We've talked about replacing cloud-init a few times in the past, but there are two objections:
- cloud-init is "standard" and we have an uphill marketing battle to get
our image adopted with something else.
- lack of a great alternative.
I completely believe both of these.
Mike has talked about a "rich boot process" previously, and I wonder if we're ready to start working on that?
I'm not sure what "rich boot process" means. I'd immediately interpret that as "a real init process" which to me means using systemd. Somehow I don't think that's what you're thinking... :)
Also, one of the CentOS GSoC projects was "Flamingo" "a lightweight contextualization tool that aims to handle initialization of cloud instances." [1] Maybe this is something we could look at for F24? CC'ing Tamer Tas, the student who worked on that. (It's targeted at being a cloud-init replacement for Atomic, so...)
That might be nice for "get rid of python" reasons. If it had cloud-init compatibility that would be even better, since people wouldn't need to migrate their provisioning infrastructure.
josh
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On Oct 28, 2015, at 10:54 AM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 08:23:59PM -0400, Bruce Harrison wrote: Although I just downloaded the Fedora Cloud, I want to test it and, if it is what I am looking for, let some of my customers who live on DeskTone, give this a test drive from a fast thumb drive on a laptop or even a modified Chromebook. These people are attorneys and real estate professionals that need the dependability of the cloud without Redmond controlling how they use the vehicle to get there - something lean and mean.
Hi Bruce. If I understand you, Fedora Cloud Base is *not* what you're looking for, although we may have something in Fedora. First, I know of several people doing their own "desktop as a service" based on Fedora, including at least one law firm. That might interest you as a possible replacement for Desktone, if that's what you're looking for.
But it sounds also like what you're looking for is a hosted file / calendar / etc sync-and-share server — what people think of as cloud services like Google Drive and etc. We have several things in the greater Fedora universe that might fit that bill, and running ownCloud — possibly on top of the Fedora Cloud Base image, or on Fedora Atomic — might indeed fill that need.
The Fedora Cloud edition downloads, however, won't give you this out of the box. (It might be something we want as a Fedora Server role in the future, though.)
I think that overall, this might be another reason for demphasizing "Cloud" as a Fedora edition. When we use the term, we mean it in the sense of cloud computing — on-demand self service, broad network access, resource pooling, elasticity, and measured service. And the Fedora Cloud image is just one part of the picture. It's an operating system meant to run inside an IaaS — infrastructure as a service — cloud provider, like Amazon EC2 or an OpenStack or Eucalyptus instance you configure yourself (see https://www.rdoproject.org/ or http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-eucalyptus.html). You could then use that to build up a Platform as a Service (on which you could run Software as a Service), or any other "XaaS" — including file storage and sync. But we don't currently have a turnkey solution for that.
But, maybe I'm misunderstanding you. Can you explain your needs a little more fully?
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ cloud mailing list cloud@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct