cloud Digest, Vol 36, Issue 24

[Steve Loranz]

Russ,

Apologies if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying here, but I think that imagefactory can do what you are looking for. The core of imagefactory supplies the REST interface, CLI, provides some storage for built images, and manages dispatching work to the plugins. The plugins do the heavy lifting and these are separated as OS and Cloud plugins. We currently have one OS plugin that started off as Fedora/RHEL specific and uses Oz to create a base JEOS image. All of the customization that creates a target image from a base image is done by a cloud plugin.

So, you could have a very minimal TDL that creates a minimal base JEOS image. You could then supply your own Cloud plugin for your virt service that does the customization you want.

The imagefactory project is packaged separately from Aeolus and can be used without any other component from Aeolus. Oz is used by the current OS plugin, but that plugin can be replaced by another that uses some other method of provisioning.

-steve



On Dec 18, 2012, at 11:39 AM, cloud-request at lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:

> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:38:43 -0500 (EST)
> From: R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com>
> To: Fedora Cloud SIG <cloud at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Cc: boxgrinder-dev at boxgrinder.org
> Subject: future of Boxgrinder ... building cloud images
> Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.02.1212181230030.6319 at puneyrf.bjyevire.pbz>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
> 
> On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, David Busby wrote:
> 
>> I think you'll find it hard to get any traction here kickstarts especially
>> in the "cloud front" are used increasingly less in favour of bootstrapping
>> an instance with  puppet / chef for provisioning above and beyond the base
>> os.
> 
> well known, but the non-idempotent, and 'successive 
> approximation' nature of such solutions converging to a 
> configuration makes such tools less compelling than a 
> using kickstart against a 'repoclosed' universe of packages.
> 
> I am interested in the building of 'base JEOS' images to our 
> virtualization service, that are then handed off as 'gold 
> masters' for clinets who THEN inject their certificates, keys 
> and credentials.  There are of course security and liability 
> implications in releasing images keyed to masters not known to 
> the end user, and kickstart solves them well, and the devops 
> tools less well
> 
>> The tdl format is somewhat of a stop gap between kickstarts and fully
>> fledged provisioning I have found, and a good project providing many
>> example tdls is the Aeolus project: http://www.aeolusproject.org/
> 
> I am generally aware of it as a project, and I think follow a 
> blog on the matter, but not a  mailing list.  I'll remedy that 
> and read for a bit.  But packaging Ruby has been a 'bear' and 
> seemed to be 'not well solved' yet. I have no aversion to Ruby 
> -- we use it on a project internally -- but adding random 
> 'gems' not well understood as to versioning and security 
> model, is troubling
> 
> -- Russ herrold