Cloud image use cases

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Joe Brockmeier <jzb at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 07/10/2015 12:59 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>>
>> The atomic image is squarely targeted at being small, and for running
>> containers.  It is somewhat positioned as a CoreOS solution.  With
>> that being the case, I'm curious how the cloud image is different and
>> not a repetitive image simply not using the atomic mechanisms.
>
> That's sort of a key difference -- atomic == I can't just dnf install
> things. cloud == I can add on what I want the way I'm used to doing.
> (e.g., not containerized)

Yes, absolutely.  However, if that is the only difference then I'm not
sure how compelling it is when you compare it to all the other images
provided elsewhere that let you do that already.  Conversely, atomic
is compelling _because_ of the Atomic platform.  Atomic has novelty
(for now), decent technical advantages, and a lot more marketing
behind it.

So what I'm really after is what sets Fedora Cloud apart from every
other distro cloud image.  What usecases is it better at than {Ubuntu,
SuSE, <whatever>}.  How should it be positioned so the people want to
use it over those, etc.  Fedora, in the Cloud space, is still behind
in market share compared to the rest of the Linux world.  I'm really
curious if that can be overcome, or if instead the focus should be on
Atomic entirely because it has a better chance.

(To be fair, Workstation and Server also have the same questions to
answer in comparison to their peers.  However, they have both history
and familiarity on their side.  Fedora has traditionally been a
"desktop" OS and Server can feed off of RHEL which dominates the
enterprise space.  Cloud doesn't share that luxury.)

josh