Cloud projects inside of RedHat

[Chris Lalancette]

Hello all,
     There are a group of us inside of RedHat working on a number of cloud
related projects.  I'd like to get a bit more visibility to these projects, so
I'm going to make a few announcements on this list.  The idea is to keep up
with these announcements and get more participation.
     The first project I'd like to point out is my own "oz" project.
The main goal of this project is to be able to do fully unattended installs
of guest OSs.  Though this isn't strictly tied to the cloud, it is one of the
foundations of being able to go all the way from a blank diskimage to a
running instance in, say, EC2.
     Oz works by using the native installer from the various OSs along with
the appropriate kickstart or other autoattend file.  In order to minimize the
possibility of errors, the initial guest that is created is Just Enough
Operating System (JEOS).  Assuming the installation of the JEOS is successful,
then the guest can be fired up to do further automatic customization (there is
prototype code to do this, but it doesn't really work yet).
     Oz is written as a set of re-usable python classes.  There is a front-end
to oz called oz-install that takes in a piece of XML (which we call the TDL
for Template Description Language), which defines the OS.  Note that this
XML format is still somewhat in flux, so it may change in the near future.
     If you want to take a look at the Oz code, it is available at:
https://github.com/clalancette/oz.  If there is enough interest in it, I can
also setup a mailing list.
     Questions, comments, and criticisms are welcome!

-- 
Chris Lalancette