[DRAFT] State of the Cloud Product Fedora 21 Alpha

[Joe Brockmeier]

Thoughts, comments, flames? Please add your comments to the tracking ticket:

https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/75

State of the Cloud Product

The first alpha for Fedora 21 is out (hooray!) and the Cloud Working
Group is excited to see that the [Cloud Base and Atomic
image](http://stg.fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease#cloud) are now out
in the wild for your testing pleasure. Let's take a few minutes to walk
through these offerings and where we're at with the Cloud product, and
where we're going. And, to pique the buzzword crowd's interest, here's a
spoiler – we'll be talking about Docker.

First, let's take a look at what you're getting with the alpha. We have
the base image, which isn't entirely new. We've offered a cloud image
suitable for deployment on EC2, OpenStack, etc. for a while now. It was
a "first-class citizen" in Fedora 20, and (once again) it's a major
focus for the release effort.

The base image is a tailored set of packages that are specially targeted
at the cloud environment. These images should be an excellent base for
developing and deploying services and applications in an IaaS
environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or private clouds like
OpenStack and Apache CloudStack.

## Atomic Base Image

What's totally new in Fedora 21 is the Atomic Base Image. What's this
Atomic business, you may well ask?

A few months ago, [Project Atomic](http://www.projectatomic.io/) was
unveiled as a community of practice to develop a platform for running
Docker containers. This means having a tailored platform build from an
existing operating system (e.g., Fedora), that allows "atomic" updates
and has just the tools you need to run and orchestrate Docker
containers. (It also should make a nifty platform for developing
containers as well!)

The idea is that a lot of folks now want to build apps and services
using containers, but they still use general purpose OSes for many
existing applications. Also, the components we need to build the Docker
host OS exist in Fedora (or CentOS, or RHEL), so there's no reason to
re-create the wheel in building the Docker host.

Atomic uses rpm-ostree to create the Fedora Atomic image, and then
allows users or admins to use rpm-ostree for updates. An update is an
"atomic" unit that can rolled back in the event there's a bug or issue
that impacts deployed applications. RPM is a great technology for
packages, but it was only envisoned to go one way – forward. The
beauty of rpm-ostree is that it lets you revert to a previous state of
the host OS with a single command. It also offers some interesting
additional features, like switching between trees for two different
systems, but we're not offering those kinds of updates/options **yet**.

The Atomic image will also feature Kubernetes, Cockpit and other
orchestration tools. Those aren't quite baked for the alpha yet, but we
hope to have them in by Fedora 21 final in a usable state.

## Docker, Docker, Docker?

It bears mentioning that the Docker base image has been split out from
the Cloud Working Group to the Base Working Group, though (obviously)
we'll still be making heavy use of it in cloud environments. A big kudos
to the Base Working Group folks who've taken that on and are doing great
work in getting it into shape for Fedora 21.

The big take-away on Docker, though, is that the Fedora 21 release will
have an "official" Docker image. You can use the Fedora 21 Atomic base
image with the F21 Docker image to test Docker features, or use Atomic
to run Docker to test your containerized applications.

## Where We're At, Where We're Going - Join Us!

As you can see, there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Cloud
territory. However, we still have a lot of work to do on testing,
packaging, and developing documentation for best practices.

We'll have a Test Day on 1 and 2 October to kick the tires and so on,
and we'd love to have a ton of Fedorans helping find bugs and problems.

Have questions? Ask us on the cloud mailing list
(cloud at lists.fedoraproject.org), or in #fedora-cloud on Freenode. Or
just poke one of the [Working Group
Members](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Governance) and ask how you
can get started.


-- 
Joe Brockmeier | Principal Cloud & Storage Analyst
jzb at redhat.com | http://community.redhat.com/
Twitter: @jzb  | http://dissociatedpress.net/

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