Why I'm excited about Atomic for Fedora

[Bruce Harrison]

Matt,

Although I just downloaded the Fedora Cloud, I want to test it and, if it is what I am looking for, let some of my customers who live on DeskTone, give this a test drive from a fast thumb drive on a laptop or even a modified Chromebook. These people are attorneys and real estate professionals that need the dependability of the cloud without Redmond controlling how they use the vehicle to get there - something lean and mean. 

If the team can get it smaller and it can access DeskTone, the universe may expand more quickly. 

Bruce


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> On Oct 27, 2015, at 6:37 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
> I've spent the last 3+ years asking people what they would like from a
> guest operating system in the cloud. Sometimes framed as "Why did you
> choose Fedora?", sometimes as "Why didn't you choose Fedora?", and
> sometimes basically the generic question.
> 
> I'd say that overall, the reason people say that they chose what they
> did was either familiarity, or that they found documentation — or
> another person — doing a similar thing, and they just followed whatever
> OS that had.
> 
> When I ask what they *want*, though, there's a somewhat different
> story. It's pretty universal, though: a small, simple base without much
> risk, and a library of components to go on top of that.
> 
> Fedora Cloud Base is a decent job of being a small base, although we
> still have a lot of dependency bloat and updates churn. But the library
> of stuff — languages, services — is difficult. We've got a great set of
> packages, but they're largely irrelevant, because the versions are
> usually changing too quickly. Mostly, you've got to bring your own
> stacks.
> 
> I'd hoped that we could answer this by slimming down the base and then
> offering a wide selection of SCLs on top. But, I don't think that's
> really panning out. The base is way less minimal than I'd like, and I
> don't know a good way to manage the updates situation. And SCLs are
> both still somewhat stuck *and* unlikely to explode (in the good sense)
> if they get unstuck.
> 
> For people who chose Fedora Cloud already — familiarity, or they found
> someone else familiar — we're probably okay. No one has anything
> negative to say about the work we've done — in fact, people who have
> chosen it generally say good things. I think it's very useful to keep
> producing Fedora Cloud Base for that group. But... it's a small club.
> 
> So, enter Atomic Host plus containers. This is, basically, exactly what
> people have been asking for. The ostree tech brings some order to the
> base, making updates more reliable and testable. And containers bring
> us the library of components — at the very least making it easier to
> bring your own, and ideally providing a new, better way for us to offer
> different versions, possibly with a different lifecycle.
> 
> That's why I'd like to move the Cloud Base image to a dedicated
> cloud.fedoraproject.org page along the lines of
> http://arm.fedoraproject.org, and replace Cloud with Atomic Host as a
> top level on <https://arm.fedoraproject.org/>, and to rename Cloud WG
> to Atomic WG (but still keeping the Cloud SIG to work on the Base
> image).
> 
> This is all just my 2¢, but I hope you'll consider them 2¢ with a lot
> of prior listening. If you have a counter story which will help us
> significantly grow adoption of Cloud Base *instead*, I'd love to hear
> it.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
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