Cloud image lifetimes

[Juerg Haefliger]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Ryan Brown <rybrown at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 03/19/2015 08:54 AM, Joe Brockmeier wrote:
>> On 03/18/2015 06:38 PM, David Gay wrote:
>>> Greetings!
>>>
>>> We sort of ran out of time in today's Cloud WG meeting, but I did want
>>> to ask:
>>>
>>> What are your thoughts on AMI lifetimes? That is to say, how long should
>>> EC2 AMIs exist before they're deleted? A few points to consider:
>>
>> I feel like I should know this, but I don't.
>>
>> If a user spins up an AMI and then it's deleted by the provider, do they
>> still have their instance(s) or do they lose the ability to create new
>> images?
>
> The instances they already started would still run and be available, but
> they wouldn't be able to spin up anything new. If creating/killing
> instances is something they do a lot (autoscaling groups, worker farms,
> etc) then that could hose them just as surely as killing their existing
> instances.

We (HP Public Cloud) even had a customer yell at us after we changed
the name of an image because that was what they were using in their
tooling to spin up instances. I'd be very careful not to break
customers and clearly communicate and have the image lifecycle
officially documented. We always advise customers to take snapshots
and use those instead of the base images so that the image is fully
under their control. But customers don't always listen...


>> That would color my response a bit.
>>
>> Do we know how other projects handle theirs? If I go to spin up a Foo
>> Linux release from 2 years ago, is the AMI still there?
>>
>> At minimum, we should probably delete any AMIs that are no longer a
>> supported version of Fedora, and I'd also be for deleting any TC, alpha,
>> beta, etc. AMIs - especially once a release is published. So, for
>> instance, any F21 alpha, beta, etc. AMIs can probably go to the great
>> bit bucket in the sky at this point.
>>
>> Also wonder if this is something we need to have ACK'ed by FESCo?
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> jzb
>>
>>
>>
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>
> --
> Ryan Brown / Software Engineer, Openstack / Red Hat, Inc.
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-- 
Juerg Haefliger
Hewlett-Packard