different delivery formats

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 01:42:28PM -0600, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Wanted to get a discussion started, there has been a few requests
> lately for our ec2 images to be made available for general consumption.
> either for use in a different cloud provider to ec2, or for use at home
> with kvm or private cloud. often the requestors reference
> http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.10/release/ im all for making
> fedora easier to consume. I made a qcow2 format image for f17 that came
> in at 610M, i also tarred and xz compressed the f16 ec2 raw disk and
> that came in at 114M the raw disk images are 10G 

Based on the size differential there between qcow2 + xz raw format,
I'm guessing you didn't turn on QCow2 compression ?  I don't think
QCow2 would get near xz size, but I think it should hve done better
than 610 MB.

> so the main question here is whats the best way to make them available
> that can easily be consumed by people.

I think it is helpful to enumerate the different possible formats and
what their benefits / users are

 - AMIs    - Only usable via EC2, no download costs for EC2 users.

 - QCow2   - Built-in compression, so immediately useable on download.
             Useful for KVM in virt-manager/etc, and KVM OpenStack.

 - Raw     - Needs external compression & decompress post download.
             Needs to be inside a tar too, to preserve raw sparseness.
             Useful for any virtualization platform, in particular
             for LXC in Fedora.

 - ZIP/Tgz - Just a plain archive of all the individual files. Useful
             for populating filesystem trees. Useful for LXC trees in
             particular. Or for creating new custom images


Currently Ubuntu provide

 - AMIs
 - Zip/Tgz
 - QCow2    (From 11.04 onwards)

Assuming we are talking 100-200 MB per image x 2 architectures, to provide
all the formats I describe above would come in at 600 - 1200 MB. Compared
to the size of all the RPMs in 1 Fedora release, this seems pretty small
and insignificant. So IMHO we could afford to provide all the formats I
describe above.

Regards,
Daniel
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