future of Boxgrinder ... building cloud images

[R P Herrold]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, David Busby wrote:

> I think you'll find it hard to get any traction here kickstarts especially
> in the "cloud front" are used increasingly less in favour of bootstrapping
> an instance with  puppet / chef for provisioning above and beyond the base
> os.

well known, but the non-idempotent, and 'successive 
approximation' nature of such solutions converging to a 
configuration makes such tools less compelling than a 
using kickstart against a 'repoclosed' universe of packages.

I am interested in the building of 'base JEOS' images to our 
virtualization service, that are then handed off as 'gold 
masters' for clinets who THEN inject their certificates, keys 
and credentials.  There are of course security and liability 
implications in releasing images keyed to masters not known to 
the end user, and kickstart solves them well, and the devops 
tools less well

> The tdl format is somewhat of a stop gap between kickstarts and fully
> fledged provisioning I have found, and a good project providing many
> example tdls is the Aeolus project: http://www.aeolusproject.org/

I am generally aware of it as a project, and I think follow a 
blog on the matter, but not a  mailing list.  I'll remedy that 
and read for a bit.  But packaging Ruby has been a 'bear' and 
seemed to be 'not well solved' yet. I have no aversion to Ruby 
-- we use it on a project internally -- but adding random 
'gems' not well understood as to versioning and security 
model, is troubling

-- Russ herrold