removing NetworkManager from cloud image?

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 02:17:14PM -0400, David Nalley wrote:
> > It's basically the same, but we have a different use case than a
> > _generic_ minimum install. I repeatedly hear that the base Fedora cloud
> > image should contain as little as possible
> Where are you hearing this from? And who is saying this? Cloud
> Providers? Users with one or two instances? massive deployments
> (thousands of VMs)?

Well I haven't talked to *anyone* who said "put in more stuff"¹. But I'm
mostly talking about developers building things in the cloud (smallish
deployments) who want to start with very little and put their own on top,
and academic cloud environments (getting close to your definition of
massive) where resources are scarce and demand is high. I've also heard this
echoed from Robyn, who can probably provide some more.

I've also heard some demand for a _bigger_ image -- "developer desktop in the
cloud", but I think that's a future step. That one almost certainly *would*
include NetworkManager.


> At least one additional cost comes in the form of QA - we can be
> relatively certain that if NM works in a VM it will work in our cloud
> image.

That's a good point, but as far as I know the "legacy" network scripts are
also still supported, right? (initscripts is still in the critical path).
Unifying network configuration in one code base seems like a good goal --
one of my motivations for the NetworkManager "one-shot config" RFE.


> Everyone I know that has anything close-to-recent Fedora images is
> building their own. (I am really surprised at the amount of use

Well, we haven't made it easy to do anything else. We're going to make it
easy with F18, and I think the smaller we can get it the more well-received
and useful to people it will be. One goal I have is to make the raw image
small enough that it's reasonable to distribute uncompressed to the Fedora
mirror network. That makes it trivial for users to pick it up and _go_.


(1. Except vim.)

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>