removing NetworkManager from cloud image?

[David Nalley]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> 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_.
>

So I promise I'll shut up after this (really)
You are right that we haven't made it easy to do anything else, but at
the same time a default image isn't useful to a lot of folks - and let
me explain why.....

If I am running a private cloud - I need things like configuration
management, and some base level of configuration, because I didn't
stand up an infrastructure than can spawn hundreds of VMs in a few
minutes only to have to manually touch them.

If I am running a public cloud - I have my own magic stuff for things
like password resets (not everyone uses cloud-init), or setting ip
addresses, or perhaps (and this is more common than you would believe)
use a custom kernel.

Both of these have the same issue - they need JEOS, but JEOS is
defined slightly differently for each environment. How do you get
there? Well you could take the Fedora image run it, customize it to
your liking, snapshot it, and then use that disk image as your 'fedora
jeos image'. However that's awfully manual - and to boot there's a new
Fedora every 6 months, which potentially means you have to repeat that
process every 6 months - which means it's prone to be different. And
if I make a mistake - oops gotta start over from scratch - or at least
the last good snapshot. This means it is ripe for automation -
(because it's something that is repeated, and needs to be exactingly
repeatable, and because it's somewhat unique to the specific
deployment.). This makes tools like Boxgrinder (and BG isn't the only
such tool, there are a plethora - RHT alone has 4 such tools that I am
aware of) ideal because it allows them to very rapidly (and
repeatably) get to their definition of JEOS, and even iterate if
necessary.

Also - on the front of wide adoption - keep in mind, that with the
exception of Amazon, every other major cloud provider builds their own
image of Fedora. Amazon doesn't care and doesn't have to, they are the
800lb gorilla in the room, and for that a truly minimal, vanilla
install that works is a good thing - I'd be willing to bet that a
Fedora EC2 image gets far more use than some of our spins. Everyone
else seems to  do their own thing - perhaps they do that because there
was no option, or perhaps they do that for everyone - but the level of
customization that we see for 'default fedora images' suggests it is
the latter.

--David