Why I'm excited about Atomic for Fedora

[Aditya Patawari]

Hello,

I am a systems engineer, managing a mid scale infrastructure in AWS
and data centers (few thousand servers). While I am not entirely sure
if this is the right thread to bring this point up or not, I would
still like to share my concerns. Please forgive me, if this looks too
far from the topic.
For me, I often have to move away from Fedora Cloud or Server editions
because of limited support cycle. I don't want to run a distribution
in my production environment where security updates won't be available
after a short amount of time. I am not sure if atomic updates or
ostree would help here. I would love to run more of Fedora Cloud or
Server instances if, at least, security updates are supported for a
longer time.
That said, I still have a fair number of instances running in
production because Fedora often packages newer releases of tools and
software which is required to run some of the applications.
Aditya Patawari
http://blog.adityapatawari.com/
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Adimania
India


On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 4:07 AM, 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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