Thing 1: what do we mean when we say cloud?

[Mo Morsi]

On 09/20/2012 10:48 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> If I haven't lost you already, I encourage you to read the definition.
> Really, it's short. But if you're hanging on by an attention-span thread,
> the essentials are:
>
>   - On demand self-service.
>   - Broad network access.
>   - Resource pooling.
>   - Rapid elasticity.
>   - Measured service.
>
> And then it goes on with service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and deployment
> models (private, community, public, hybrid).

+1 this looks good. Everyone should memorize this as part of the
elevator pitch for the Fedora / Cloud efforts (which often times
involves explaining what the cloud is).


> I suggest that Fedora adopt this as our definition, and as the basis for the
> scope of this SIG. I think this is uncontroversial, but I would like to hear
> your feedback.
>
> Of particular note, work here so far has focused on two primary areas:
> "JEOS" images³ for Amazon EC2 (and elsewhere), and on software stacks for
> deploying cloud infrastructure (Eucalyptus, OpenStack) as a cloud provider.
> This has been great so far, but I also want to open up the SIG to some
> broader areas as well — those use areas and constituent groups being the
> topic of future discussion.
>
>

The way I'm looking at things (and I confirmed this at the OLF
conference last week), the cloud is very new and very uncertain. It's
not the be-all-end-all but is a great solution for certain things, but
because its so new (the underlying concepts are old, but the unification
and mass-adoption is new) Fedora has a great opportunity to really pave
the way and establish a dominant position in open cloud technologies.

In addition to the efforts above, I feel we can be particularly
successful in setting new trends with regards to deploying to the cloud.
I've recently starting building scripts for the Aeolus suite [1] to
build images for Fedora infrastructure components (mock, koji, and
bodhi) that will work on any cloud provider [2].

Combine that with our tool proving a unified interface to deploy to any
cloud [3] as well as tools to configure communication across clouds
(puppet, juju, audrey, and more) and we could provide a solid use case /
example of building and using open cloud technologies.

I'd love to work with anyone in the Fedora Cloud SIG and generally in
the large Fedora community to start trying out deploying various
components of the Fedora infra to multiple cloud providers (perhaps EC2
and our own openstack instance). I will be writing up / blogging
step-by-step instructions on how to use these templates w/ the tooling
in the near future to make the process all the easier.

  -Mo

[1] https://www.aeolusproject.org/
[2] https://github.com/aeolus-incubator/templates/tree/master/fedora_infra
[3] http://deltacloud.apache.org/drivers.html