Future directions for Fedora Cloud

[Vitaly Kuznetsov]

Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> writes:

> Does this sound interesting / valuable? Are there other directions you'd
> like to see us go?

We could also follow SUSE's approach with their buildservice: provide
users with easily accessible infrastructure to build their own cloud
appliances (with custom package set, custom initial settings, ...) and
upload them to public cloud providers (I've seen buildservice creating
custom AMI for EC2, pretty impressive I would say). We can also think
about keeping a public library of such appliances (or rather their
'sources' e.g. kickstarts).

This idea is based on my observation that Fedora is really good choice
for short-lived cloud deployments (when you need a solution 'here and
now'). But starting from scratch every time (run empty minimal image,
update, install required packages, configure,... ) is painful
enough. You can always save your configured image but it will require
you to update this image regularly and rebuild completely with every new
fedora release. You can do the job with e.g. cloud-init script but it
will significantly slow down boot process for _all_ new instances. So
having a service which will provide you with your custom and fresh image
every time you need it (e.g. daily) would be nice.

Just my $0.02 and I'm not sure the target audience is wide enough...

-- 
  Vitaly Kuznetsov