Should Fedora revisit the idea having "one " image to be used across the cloud providers?

[Robyn Bergeron]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kashyap Chamarthy" <kchamart at redhat.com>
> To: "Fedora Cloud SIG" <cloud at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 12:04:20 PM
> Subject: Should Fedora revisit the idea having "one " image to be used across	the cloud providers?
> 
> (Re-directing the discussion from #fedora-cloud on Freenode..)
> 
> Heya,
> 
> (Without trying to make it a large 'theoretical' discussion..)
> 
> 
> So, should we (Fedora) reconsider the "noble goal" (as Matthew Miller put it)
> of having
> one cloud image serve all cloud providers? Or separate images (sure, there's
> more work
> involved) that are specific

As a few others have stated - I think it would be best to just have one image (to rule them all, muhahah); if nothing else, it helps to eliminate possibilities around what and why it's broken and so forth. I also can totally see a situation where some flavors of images (for lack of a better term) eventually get so buried in little changes here and there that they just become technical debt that we will struggle to pay off if we do want to later pursue the Noble Goal.

I also agree with the multi-vendor, cloudbursting scenario that Robert mentioned later in this thread, and how that just makes management of images more difficult; while I would guess that a user sophisticated enough to be in the cloud is possibly creating images of their own, I still think they'd want to ensure that their starting point is consistent so that any automation they have doesn't need to be riddled with if/then scenarios.

> 
>  Because, lately we've seen several problems where cloud-init has been
>  breaking things in
> subtle ways, like output of boot messages on console.log for
> OpenStack/Amazon/Eucalyptus
> has been broken in different

I wonder if this is something we should be testing for? 

> 
> Garret Holmstrom and Matthew Miller (both who's been in the trenches of these
> issues can
> describe much better than I can at this midnight hour). They also discussed a
> couple of
> ideas on IRC like
> 
>  - configuring journald to forward to both syslog and the console
> 
> 
> e.g. (please read the issue described above)
> 
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=977952 -- RFE: disable all
>   direct writes to
> the console
> 
> 
> And, comparing Fedora images with Cirros -- they output a neat array of bunch
> of commands
>  (I think I noted this previously on this list) that's helpful for debugging.
>  Refer this
> previous thread
> 
>   https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/2013-April/002371.html
> 
> but haven't reached a proper conclusion.
> 
> 
> Any further thoughts from other folks here on how to resolve this would be
> nice to hear.
> 
> 
> --
> /kashyap
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