On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, David Huff wrote:
> Tools that help our users do what? It can't be cloud stuff
because at
> that point it's circular reasoning.
>
> -Mike
Well there are three components of cloud stuff
1) The images that run the guests, the hypervisor, or node.
2) Cloud management, They manage not only the underlying nodes but also
the guest on the nodes.
3) The guests
The problem is that Fedora fits into all of these places. For the EC2
users we are focused on #3, for Ovirt, RHEV-H, and other cloud
deployments #1, and for Fedora infrastructure we are focused on all
three but mainly #2?
So how do we approach this?
By bounding the handful of problems that we *know* we need to solve that
pertain to "cloud".
There can be no doubt that "getting Fedora images to work on EC2" falls
under "cloud".
There can be little doubt that "getting Fedora images to work on other
public clouds" also falls under cloud, and one hopes that the processes
bear some resemblance to one another.
There can be little doubt that "moving a workload from this public cloud
to that public cloud" falls under cloud, since that's largely the
point of Deltacloud -- although there is some doubt about how many people
will be keen on that particular use case.
There's all kinds of doubt about "private cloud", and where that separates
from plain ol' "managing a bunch of VMs" -- which is why, I think, we
start with the public cloud cases. Because (a) we really *need* to get
those squared away so that Fedora doesn't end up with lots of crappy
images floating around the public cloud providers, and (b) getting those
use cases straightened out will give us some insights (I hope) about how
private clouds work, and the differences between "private cloud" and
"plain ol' VM management". Which may be vanishingly few, and dependent
largely upon context.
Here's a use case I hear described all the time:
* Developer has hot idea.
* Developer asks for IT resources from Big Bastard Company to implement
idea.
* IT staff at BBC says "fill out these fifty forms and we'll get back to
you a fortnight after never ever."
* Developer plunks down credit card for EC2 instance and expenses it as
"lunch for client", since the monthly cost is roughly equivalent.
* Developer gets cool proof-of-concept working on cloud! While
inadvertently ending up dependent on lots of particular "cloud-isms",
like, say, Amazon's Elastic Block Storage.
* Boss says "WANT".
* IT staff says "oh crap, now how do we move this thing in-house?"
One day this discussion may have more meat. One day Deltacloud may be
more relevant. One day the relationships between public and private
clouds will be crystal clear. In the meantime, I just wanna see people I
know using the *public cloud* as it exists today to solve actual problems,
so we can be speaking from a position of understanding, rather than
talking hypotheticals.
--g
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