Other cloud providers - Fedora on things other than EC2 + marketing

[Major Hayden]

On Nov 3, 2010, at 8:44 AM, Robyn Bergeron wrote:

> FWIU, Major Hayden (rackerhacker on IRC) had the images uploaded
> yesterday for F14 launch, and they're available to use on rackspace
> cloud / slicehost already, as he's done for F13 and F12 releases.
> This is what spurred this thread originally - that it would be great
> for us to be marketing that F14 is available through other providers
> as well.
> 
> It's not necessarily a case of "knowing the right guy" - I think it's
> more than we have a Fedora enthusiast over at Rackspace, and uploading
> those images happens to be part of his job.  Of course, that could
> theoretically become a single point of failure if he left, so I think
> it would be good to have the discussion with about what the options
> are to circumvent that situation.  He's on this list, so I'll poke him
> on IRC and see if he can provide us with some more detail.
> 
> -robyn

Robyn described my work pretty well.  I'm the guy responsible for building all of the Linux base images for Rackspace customers to use, but there are others on my team that pitch in as well.  It's also true that I'm a Fedora enthusiast. ;)

I started this discussion in IRC because although I'm glad to see traction on Fedora on EC2 (more Fedora usage is great), there are other providers (like the one I work for) that expend a lot of effort to provide Fedora for customers without any effort required from the Cloud SIG or Fedora developers.  However, those providers don't receive much attention or recognition in the fashion that EC2 does[1].  I completely understand that EC2 is extremely popular and that many cloud users think that EC2 is the only cloud compute offering available. ;-)

Just for a little background, we've had Fedora running on Xen at Rackspace for customers since Fedora 9.  We go through thorough processes to provide a consistent experience for users when new Fedora releases are made and we perform a large amount of testing with new Fedora releases in our environment.  While we certainly welcome outside assistance, we don't require any help to get a new Fedora release out the door for customers.  If something's broken, we find workarounds.  If it's still broken after that, we engage the development community to find a solution.

Robyn asked this morning if building the Fedora images is one of the duties of my job, or if it's something I do on my own time.  It's a bit of both; most of our demand surrounds Ubuntu and CentOS.  Users tend to prefer Ubuntu because they find it easier to use (I don't necessarily agree) and they prefer CentOS because of its stability.  Fedora is usually a "back-burner" item for the business but I take pride in pushing it to the front burner when a new release is available.

Robyn also asked about the possibility of the Cloud SIG uploading a Fedora image for customer use (as Amazon does with AMI's) and the possibility of running the Fedora kernel.  We don't offer the image upload option quite yet (but it's on the way), but we are offering pv-grub (in beta) for customers to use whichever kernel they like within their instance.  Once that comes out of beta, we will probably build Fedora images with pv-grub enabled and the Fedora kernel installed from the start.

As always, if there's anything else I can do for the Fedora community, I'm eager to help!

[1] http://press.redhat.com/2010/10/28/fedora-14-has-its-head-in-the-cloud/

--
Major Hayden