[DISCUSS] Making Atomic the cloud edition

Fri Aug 21 16:16:32 UTC 2015

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matt Micene" <nzwulfin at gmail.com>
> To: "Fedora Cloud SIG" <cloud at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 6:49:18 AM
> Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Making Atomic the cloud edition
> 
> Given:
> 
> >  jzb
> >
> Given that a great deal of interesting work is going into the Fedora
> > Atomic host, we'd like to make Atomic the main deliverable/focus for the
> > Cloud Working Group and Cloud edition.
> 
> 
> and
> 
> mattdm
> >
> For that, we need the Cloud Base to have *internal* visibility and
> > connections, but it doesn't need to confuse the marketing message.
> >
> 
> I think moving the focus of Cloud SIG to focus on Atomic would confuse
> folks more than the currently slim messaging around the Cloud SIG goals.  I
> think CentOS has the right approach with a separate Atomic SIG, and I
> propose that we follow that model.  Split Atomic into it's own SIG,
> continue the Cloud SIG to focus on cloud things.
> 
> Atomic is a new way of doing everything.  OS management changes, package
> management changes, Docker + K8S + Nulecule + Atomicapp + ? + ? + ?.  We
> are trying to move at a much more rapid pace than the rest of the Fedora
> Project products (see the 2 week release proposal).  We are breaking things
> at a much more rapid pace than other products as well.  Lots of initial
> answers on ask / IRC wind up as, "update the tree see if it's still
> broken".
> 
> I  don't think that if you say the word "cloud" in a room of IT folks
> today, that over 1% are going to think Atomic.  They think OpenStack,
> OpenShift, CloudFoundry, Eucalyptus, AWS, ownCloud, etc.  Fedora as
> foundation, Fedora as tenant, Fedora as a Service!  The new Cloud SIG draft
> reflects those use cases: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_SIG-new-draft.
> Fedora saying "well when *we* say cloud we mean Atomic not what you think"
> and having to explain it doesn't sound like a win.

Thanks for pointing to this doc (though I see now that it was
last updated in 2013). It's a pretty ambitious set of goals --
esp things like getting various IaaS platforms running on Fedora.

An important question is what our contributor base wants to work on --
I haven't seen much mention of things like getting IaaS running on 
Fedora in the cloud sig meetings.

For the cloud image itself, I don't fully understand why I'd want
a specialized cloud image over a minimal Fedora image -- being 
on Amazon and making minimal, but otherwise stock Fedora images 
available feels like a core distro task to me. 

It's true, though, that CentOS has both Cloud and Atomic SIGs, both
with plenty to do, so that model might fit here, as well. No need to 
wrench the SIG away from non-atomic matters if that's where the SIG 
contributors want to place their efforts. The question is, where do
the SIG members wish to focus... I guess that's what this thread
is about.

Jason

> 
> And while there's overlap in uses like cloud-init, Atomic is much more
> likely to want a completely new compatible implementation because the
> dependency tree makes maintenance more complex than a Fedora OpenStack
> guest image will need to care about.  (See my previous rants on sizing ;-)
> ).  Or a Fedora Server optimized for running nova-compute.  The Cloud Base
> Image and the Atomic host or the Docker Base Image don't and shouldn't have
> much in common because the use cases are different.
> 
> I do think that the Cloud SIG does need better messaging about its intents
> and goals.  The new SIG draft looks like a step in the right direction to
> me.  Define major focus areas (run IaaS on Fedora, run Fedora in IaaS, etc)
> then layer in use cases and projects from the group.
> 
> A new Atomic SIG would focus on stabilizing the Atomic host, the delivery
> process, and the Docker base image.  Atomic hosts are all about running
> Docker workloads, so that makes sense to couple.  As containerization
> grows, I could see the need for moving Docker image management somewhere
> else.
> 
> Did I miss the 72 hr window?
> 
> - matt m
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 08:04:33PM +0530, Lalatendu Mohanty wrote:
> > > Does it mean that we are assuming that we have considerable users
> > > using current fedora atomic image
> > > or considerable users using the cloud image mostly for running
> > > containers and going to increase in future ?
> > > I understand that Atomic host having newer technology which is
> > > better for a world of containers but just want to make sure the
> > > decision is driven by user needs.
> >
> > I'm at LinuxCon, which is also at the same time CloudOpen and
> > ContainerCon. The sample size is small and the audience skewed, but:
> > I've talked to several (three) people using/testing Fedora Atomic, at
> > least one of them fairly seriously; no one using Cloud Base image.
> >
> > That's not to say that they don't exist (hi there!), but I think user
> > interest/excitement around Atomic is clear. Perhaps more crucially as
> > we make this plan, I think the people who want basic-Fedora-in-the-cloud
> > are less likely to be a "wedge" audience, where we can market that as
> > their first exposure to Fedora and from there possibly grow into more
> > areas. Rather, they're going to be people who already know Fedora, or
> > are already interested in us in general, and then are looking to have
> > that in a cloud environment.
> >
> > For that, we need the Cloud Base to have *internal* visibility and
> > connections, but it doesn't need to confuse the marketing message.
> > Specifically, I'd like it to go in the "Other Downloads" section of
> > <https://getfedora.org/en/cloud/download/>, introduced like this:
> >
> >
> >   "Looking for a plain, non-Atomic image optimized for cloud
> >   environments? Download Fedora Cloud Base Image: [...]"
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Matthew Miller
> > <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> > Fedora Project Leader
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> 
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