different delivery formats

[Dennis Gilmore]

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On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:49:49 -0500
David Nalley <david at gnsa.us> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us>
> wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > Wanted to get a discussion started, there has been a few requests
> > lately for our ec2 images to be made available for general
> > consumption. either for use in a different cloud provider to ec2,
> > or for use at home with kvm or private cloud. often the requestors
> > reference http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.10/release/ im
> > all for making fedora easier to consume. I made a qcow2 format
> > image for f17 that came in at 610M, i also tarred and xz compressed
> > the f16 ec2 raw disk and that came in at 114M the raw disk images
> > are 10G
> >
> > so the main question here is whats the best way to make them
> > available that can easily be consumed by people.
> >
> > Dennis
> 
> 
> Hi Dennis:
> 
> So qcow2 works well for KVM - but perhaps providing just a raw image
> and allowing folks to use qemu-img or whatever suits their fancy to
> work. Of course, if we really want to do all of the work, we should
> build raw, qcow2, vmdk, and vhd in addition to the EC2 AMIs.
> 
> And to your main question - why wouldn't they be downloadable from
> the mirrors?

i guess i didnt not make myself totally clear, yes it would go on the
mirrors. but what format should be presented to the user? a tar xz
compressed raw image, a qcow2 image with compression (we need to teach
appliance-tools and koji to do this), some other format not though of
yet.

My main question is not at how to deliver it to the users but what to
deliver.

We would make images for Alpha, Beta, and GA. there would be no
updates. so you would need to yum update them after you boot.  

Im still not convinced that delivering images in this way really is the
best thing, some pitfalls i see, they dont run firstboot so you have no
way to get in. you need to boot to run level 1 and add a user or set a
password for root.  or setup something so that cloud-init will get a
key in place for the ec2-user. 

I really think that teaching people to do a kickstart based install is
simpler, and allows the users to setup some things for their
environment. But as its a requested thing, if people find it really
useful then we should try to accomodate them and make the experience as
painless as possible.

Dennis
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