Cloud image use cases

[Ryan Brown]

On 07/10/2015 08:52 AM, Major Hayden wrote:
> On 07/10/2015 07:28 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> OK.  So your answer to my immediate question is "neutral base that 
>> people have to customize".  Fair enough.  Now, why would someone
>> wish to choose a Fedora cloud image over Ubuntu or CoreOS or any of
>> the other "minimal base that you have to customize" images?
> 
> It depends on the use case (which seems like a recursive statement in
> this thread). ;)
> 
> Our customers (disclaimer: I work for Rackspace) usually choose the
> operating system for cloud instances that they're most familiar with
> or the ones that mesh will with their organization's strategy.
> Ubuntu seems to be a popular choice due to the million howto's laying
> around for installing services on Ubuntu.
> 
> When it comes to the ultra-minimal OS choices largely intended for
> container platforms, like CoreOS, Atomic, or RancherOS, the customer
> usually has an idea of how they're planning to integrate/automate
> those operating systems on multiple instances.
> 
> Whenever I've spoken with customers about what they want from an OS
> in a virtual machine, they want it to contain a small package set
> that lets them run their automation on top of it (i.e. Ansible, Chef,
> Puppet).  Removing Python from that image would be a serious
> curveball since most people expect to have Python available on any
> system running yum/dnf.

Well, it kind of has to be available until we make yum/dnf not need
Python anymore, which sounds like *loads* of work.

Personally, I like (and use) the cloud image for two use cases.

1) Openstack development with local virtualization. Having a
small-footprint image that has cloud-init is awesome for testing
coordination or multinode installations of databases/services.

2) Cloud infrastructure (AWS/Rackspace)
  a) an OS I'm familiar with
  b) has great docs/community
  c) is pretty low-resource/cheap to run
  d) has up-to-date stuff
  e) automation I've written for RHEL-derivatives "just works"
  f) works everywhere I want

-- 
Ryan Brown / Software Engineer, Openstack / Red Hat, Inc.