Cloud image use cases

[Major Hayden]

On 07/10/2015 07:28 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> OK.  So your answer to my immediate question is "neutral base that
> people have to customize".  Fair enough.  Now, why would someone wish
> to choose a Fedora cloud image over Ubuntu or CoreOS or any of the
> other "minimal base that you have to customize" images?

It depends on the use case (which seems like a recursive statement in this thread). ;)

Our customers (disclaimer: I work for Rackspace) usually choose the operating system for cloud instances that they're most familiar with or the ones that mesh will with their organization's strategy.  Ubuntu seems to be a popular choice due to the million howto's laying around for installing services on Ubuntu.

When it comes to the ultra-minimal OS choices largely intended for container platforms, like CoreOS, Atomic, or RancherOS, the customer usually has an idea of how they're planning to integrate/automate those operating systems on multiple instances.

Whenever I've spoken with customers about what they want from an OS in a virtual machine, they want it to contain a small package set that lets them run their automation on top of it (i.e. Ansible, Chef, Puppet).  Removing Python from that image would be a serious curveball since most people expect to have Python available on any system running yum/dnf.

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Major Hayden