Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2013-10-28 at 08:55 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
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> == What are our use-cases? ==
> 
> Full disclosure: the use-cases I am listing below come from
> discussions I have had within Red Hat for what we would like to see in
> Fedora that we can best build on to become Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
> Please take this in the spirit it is given: I am disclosing what Red
> Hat wants up front, so we aren't accused of working towards hidden
> goals. I am also not committing us to covering any or all of these
> targets. I do believe however that the majority of these use-cases
> will be beneficial to both Fedora and Red Hat.
> 
>  * Provide a platform for acting as a node in an OpenStack rack.

Isn't this the goal of the Cloud Product ?

>  * Provide a platform and simple setup for certain infrastructure
> services, e.g.
>    * FreeIPA Domain Controller

I think we also need to help getting a Samba Ad Domain Controller as
well, although that is mostly blocked due to upstream work, and I am not
sure we can do much here, beyond encouraging upstream.

>    * BIND DNS
>    * DHCP
>    * Database server (both free and commercial).

s/commercial/proprietary/ I guess ?

I do not think Fedora should care about proprietary ones particularly,
we shouldn't be hostile, but neither cater for them too much, most of
the contributors wouldn't have the means to do it anyway, and
proprietary vendors can better install on RHEL and interact with RH.

>  * Provide simple setup of a file-server (on par with Windows).

There be dragons :-) But I agree.

>  * Platform for deploying web applications with high-value frameworks.
>    * Ruby on Rails
>    * Django
>    * Turbogears
>    * Node.js

Are we going to do this via Software Collections ?
The main issue I see with these is that various apps requires at times,
conflicting versions of the same base framework/language.

>  * Make Fedora the best platform to deploy JBoss applications.
>  * Come up with standardized mechanisms for centralized monitoring
>  * Come up with standardized mechanisms for centralized configuration
> and management
>  * Simple enrollment into FreeIPA and Active Directory domains
>  * Provide the best platform for secure application deployment
>    * Isolation of OS from applications
>    * Isolation of applications from each other
>    * Isolation of application users from each other
>    * Management of application resource consumption

You mean containers and cgroups here ?

>  * Simplify management and deployment.[1]
>  * Deliver the world's best leading edge DevOps platform.

Uhm Server and DevOps are not necessarily aligned in my mind, but I
guess it depends on how leading edge you make stuff.

I think the main issue is the amount of packages we try to cram in the
"OS". If we keep the OS elan and move most of the rapidly evolving
frameworks in collections, we can probably pull this off, but the
balance will be critical.

> == My initial thoughts ==
> I am open to counter-arguments, naturally.
> 
> [1] Ideally, we want a mid-level Microsoft admin to be able to manage
> Fedora without much learning curve.

For this you need wizards and (web) UIs, I am not sure how much in our
charter there is for developing additional software, Fedora usually is
about packaging stuff, mostly.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York