Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2013-10-28 at 09:22 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 09:06:14AM -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:
> > >  * Provide a platform for acting as a node in an OpenStack rack.
> > Isn't this the goal of the Cloud Product ?
> 
> We haven't figured this all out yet. It's definitely not *the* goal -- most
> of us on the cloud WG are thinking about cloud guest images, but there may
> be room for this case as well. And, on the other hand, the server product
> probably also wants to be able to run under virtualization including in
> cloud providers.
> 
> One possible way to think about the division is in the pets vs. cattle
> analogy (which is such a good one that it's quickly becoming worn thin --
> bear with me if you've heard this too many times already).  
> 
> Traditional servers have names, personalities, and are lovingly cared for.
> When they get sick, you diagnose the problem and carefully nurse them back
> to health, sometimes at great expense. Like pets. On the other hand, cattle
> are numbered, and thought of as basically identical, and if they get sick,
> you put them down and get another one.
> 
> With this distinction in mind, compute nodes may indeed better fit into the
> cloud product, even though they run on bare hardware. We'll see.

This was my thinking, I thought the cloud WG is about building lean
images that do not have much in the way of wizards, installers, and
hand-holding software, but are focused toward rapid deployment, either
as lean hosts or as computing/elastic guests, all controlled via some
configuration engine like puppet etc... basically single task machines.

I see the server WG more about building heavier, long term, multipurpose
servers (be it on bare metal or as guest).

Simo.

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