On 07/20/11 - 11:19:49AM, Angus Thomas wrote:
On 19/07/11 22:19, Hugh Brock wrote:
Now of course what we've given up here is the notion of image equivalency -- that you can build something that will be close-enough-to-identical in its EC2 incarnation and its RHEV-M incarnation that people will accept it as such. Having said that, is the value proposition of RHEL not precisely that equivalency -- i.e. that you can launch RHEL on EC2 and it will behave precisely the way RHEL on VMWare or RHEL on RHEV-M behaves? If you the customer are willing to accept that some limited number of JEOSes -- which we could ship and preinstall with Conductor, by the way -- are enough images to suffice, and that you would then use some part of Orchestrator to install packages post-boot or run your own script to install things post-boot... well, then you don't need a template-building UI, because you never have to build a template.
I firmly believe that the reason not having a template building UI is a problem, is because we keep telling people they have to build templates in order to do things. I further think if we want Conductor to be successful, we should fix it so people don't have to build templates unless they really, really want to.
I think this is absolutely right. A base OS image can be used for a huge array of purposes, which will allow users to get value of of Aeolus by launching useful deployments, rather than getting bogged down in building and managing multiple iterations of images.
<snipping other useful stuff>
I agree with this aspect of images for clouds, but only as one possible deployment model. My worry is that if we say this "thin provisioning" model is the one true model, then you are requiring people to accept that model in its entirety.
On the flip side, I think there are people who have servers running in their datacenter today that want to try out, or slowly transition to, the cloud. For those people, the more traditional model where all of their software is pre-installed and only a few minor pieces of configuration are done at boot is easier to swallow and more like what they are doing today. Additionally, this will be much faster to boot; have you ever watched how slow yum is to install a large amount of packages?
That's why I advocate an image-building UI. Of course, if someone has substantial data to show that customers are *not* interested in my alternate model, then I'm happy to change my position :).