On Mi, Dez 16, 2020 at 23:01, Peter Boy pboy@uni-bremen.de wrote:

The current PRD is from 2014. Urgently needs to be revised along the following general objectives:

• We want the target audience and server edition goals to keep up to

date as the computing world changes

• But there are also big changes in how servers are used and

deployed. Fedora should be at the forefront.

This leads to at least 4 questions:

• What are the high level goals?
• What is our *market*?
• how server relate to curent developments, coreos cloud, etc.?
• merging in the Cloud Base image so it's basically just an alternate

deploy of server?

Hi y'all,

thank you for the opportunity to attend to the meeting yesterday.

There was a lot of impressions and ideas, which left me a bit puzzled in the end. Below I have tried to address my questions and to address the questions. Please keep in mind, that this is my very personal view. Leaving my background at Ansible aside, I have no knowledge of earlier decisions, discussions or processes. I would appreciate feedback, critiques, questions and a lot of patience on your side :) Hopefully I will be helpful at some point in time.

Thanks a lot in advance for your time.

---------------------------------------------

# 1) My questions

- Is there a general difference between SIG Server and Server WG? - Is there some general scope of both and overlaps to other SIGs and WGs?

---------------------------------------------

# 2) My view on the above questions

## High Level goals

For me, it is quite hard to define high level goals. But maybe I can provide my intention, why I started to use Fedora as a Server distribution.

I am a IT/Dev/Ops/DevOps Consultant working mostly for companies, that are having the below issues:

- developers require new software (php, node, ruby, java, name-it) - operators need to maintain 2-3 hardware vendors, 2-3 major versions of OS, 2-3 different OS types - business has several demands to developers and operators (yesterday!!!11)

The bottleneck very often was a situation of "we need to maintain A, B is running only on C, D is to old for E, F is so old - nobody wants to touch it, G takes ages, because somebody needs to backport H. Other issues are often something coming from Security and Audits, which require: Audit Tools, Log Monitoring, regular Patches, Firewall, SELinux/Apparmor, Hardening for X, etc.

Many of these problems were solvable with Fedora as a plattform and/or/optional RHEL'ish ecosystem.

- many security tools out of the box (usbguard, SELinux, firewalld, auditd, aide, etc.) - kernel is very new and therefore supports tons of hardware - software is very new and supports tons of developer demand - additional software like cockpit, pcp, tuned, etc. is very handy for small to larger environments (nobody wants to use cockpit to manage 100s of servers, but providing a UI for devs/unexperienced ops/hosting customers is quite nice) - fedora-minimal is quite nice container base to build upon - the awareness of EOL and mitigation plans are immediatly a thing, if the lifetime is 13 month only - the awareness of single instance SLA is a thing, if you should patch at least every 90 days AND reboot - developers are able to use the same tools on their notebook/workstation they can use on the servers/images

"But there is this 10 year old ERP/CRM/Connector, that nobody wants to touch."

- Why touching it then? - Is it worth the effort? - What does it cost to migrate to a new OS compared to migrate to a new ERP? - If nothing fits, RHEL/CentOS is basically the same ecosystem and will run for 10 years support.

## Market

I can see at least the following personas (all of them is me to some degree) using Fedora Server:

### The Tinkerer

I have a raspberry/intel nuc/etc. and playing a bit with new stuff. I need a lot of "cool" packages. Newest nodejs, php8, GPIO support, build tools, containers, vms, name-it. Give me all of this, in BETA please. I want the newest shit and I want to break it.

### The Home Admin

I need a somewhat stable machine, with a graphical interface (cockpit) and just want to start a couple of containers and/or VMs to have nextcloud running on it. I need some gitea here, some gitlab there, some jenkins, some photoprism, minecraft, etc. Can I build a NAS easily? I am ok with updates and reboots over night, but it should work. It would be awesome to have mDNS and a Web UI.

### The Developer

I need to have a plattform, that feels like my workstation. I want to build containers, start them, test them and push them. If I can have nodejs, ruby, php in a decently current version, that would be awesome. I am ok pulling stuff from "the interwebs", as long as it works and does not bother me too much with: "This container will not run on RHEL, because it requires X or Y." Yesterday I read something about "remote podman", can I use it? Why isn't podman dnsname plugin working on the servers, but on my Fedora Workstation? What does the admin mean with "prepare the image for virtualization/cloning/templating"?

### The Operator

I want to have a reliable plattform for virtualization, core services and container. It should be out of my way, so I can focus on scaling, monitoring, implementation. I want to automate configurations for hostname, timeserver, hardening, etc. In addition I want to deploy typical services like mariadb, httpd, nginx, redis, nodejs, java, etc. in a reproducible way. To see what the machines are doing, I need a well documented way to manage, monitor and backup them. My Security Team also wants me to disable unneeded services, disable legacy protocols, enable hardening on several levels.

### The "Let's make a distribution" / "Let's build upon it"

I love how Fedora works and I want to create something upon it. My new distro will feature all the cool fedora things and I want to add some software on top of it. I need a very well documented build process and maybe tools to produce new install images and packages. Removing the branding should be possible with some compiler flags or variables, so I don't need to mess with the code itself.

This will allow me to build my new distribution which will be the perfect:

- NAS - CloudStorage - media server - gaming server - home server - SOHO distribution - etc.

## Relation to cloud, coreos, etc.

I am not very deeply involved in these projects. But some examples are coming to my mind.

For example, the IoT Edition features 2 tools (greenboot and zezere), which may be a nice addition for smaller environments or edge computing. Both tools are currently meant for IoT only, but can be easily adopted. Zezere for example can be used to add SSH Keys (or else) to remote edge servers and greenboot is capable to trigger scripts if something goes wrong.

For the cloud/coreos approach, there is even more stuff in both ecosystems. podman, docker and kubernetes are a thing that are present on both platforms. Ignition on the other hand shares some of the capabilities of kickstart (at least from a user perspective). I am not sure why 2 different deployment approaches, that basically do the same (preconfigure a system) should co-exist on the long run. To be honest coreOS in its current state lacks some features, that I personally love and even Fedora IoT or Silverblue feel more "mature". For example installing cockpit on Fedora IoT is basically the same as in fedora server. The cockpit deployment on coreos does not work the way it is documented and the IoT way does not work either. CoreOS (at least for now) seems somewhat out of place.

Supporting each other to have a coherent experience, where everything "feels" well known would be the only correct step from my perspective.

---

### Contact

daniel@while-true-do.io while-true-do.io

### Web

style-cheat.io while-true-do.io

### Code

github.com/while-true-do/ github.com/style-cheat/ github.com/kudos-txt/ github.cim/daniel-wtd/

### Social

twitter.com/daniel_wtd reddit.com/u/daniel-wtd daniel-wtd @freenode

### Disclaimer

If not stated otherwise all of my work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

I think one important question is WHY we use Fedora.

In my case, I started using Fedora because it had the latest stable drivers for the newest hardware. With today's hardware performances and the widespread use of virtualization, that is no longer an issue (or at least not a big issue).

I still use Fedora because it has the latest stable version of most packages and modern sysadmin tools (i.e. cockpit, dnf, systemd were all "tested" with Fedora).

What I mean by "stable" is that Fedora is not bleeding edge (like Rawhide), but stable enough to put in production and give it a try.

As for roles, I don't think Fedora Server can compete in the hypervisor/hyperconvergence arena against Proxmox or Xen.

Taking all this into account, this is how I view "Fedora Server" goals:

- Provide a minimalistic server install (for instance, NetworkManager is overkill for a server, and in many cases a hindrance). - Key packages like databases, languages, Web infrastructure must be solid and pre-configured for high loads (things like php-fpm, nginx, Postgres, etc.). - Provide kernels tuned for large RAM, high storage I/O and high network I/O. - Provide easy integration into multi-node environments, with tools like Ansible (we may have to favor one such tool, like we favor cockpit). - We must keep upgrades smooth, as they are now with dnf. - A "Security Profile" may be suitable. For instance at a minimum a nice Firewalld+Fail2Ban configuration, then go up with Snort, Tripwire, SELinux.

In short, have a distro that can be deployed in 5min in a small VM and start doing something useful half an hour later :-)

Carlos

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 11:02 PM Peter Boy pboy@uni-bremen.de wrote:

Today there was an IRC discussion about the next tasks Fedora Server WG has to work on. I would like to give here a short overview in the hope that many may contribute their ideas here. The wording is unimportant, short sketches of ideas are sufficient. A editorial group has been established to edit a proposal for a revised draft. But we need input from the server community!

Our current PRD is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Document , general considerations on the structure of such a document are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_requirements_document

The current PRD is from 2014. Urgently needs to be revised along the following general objectives:

• We want the target audience and server edition goals to keep up to date

as the computing world changes

• But there are also big changes in how servers are used and deployed.

Fedora should be at the forefront.

This leads to at least 4 questions:

• What are the high level goals?
• What is our *market*?
• how server relate to curent developments, coreos cloud, etc.?
• merging in the Cloud Base image so it's basically just an alternate

deploy of server?

Please, contribute your ideas!

Some detailed opinions were thrown in:

• Server should forcus on mostly headless services - single node

deployments, and multi node deployments

• A goal might also be pushing for text-only mechanisms for all relevant

administrative functions (cf. the gpg-agent discussion)

• focus on soho rather than enterprise at this point.

• strong container support in "my basement" and in "soho".. including

things like openshift

• are server roles still a thing? (The Server Roles in PRD were abandoned?)

• are tools/app included supporting industry change (e.g. IPMI is

deprecated, Redfish is the future)

Any inout greatly appreciated.

Peter (One of those to draft an updated proposal) _______________________________________________ server mailing list -- server@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to server-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/server@lists.fedoraproject.org