Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Simo Sorce <simo at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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).

Yes, that's the way I think of this as well: Single-purpose systems
with horizontal scaling are primarily a Cloud domain.

Or, to take it from the other end, something like the oVirt minimal VM
host should, I think, be built from/by the Cloud product.  For the
Server product we'd be completely fine with using a little extra space
(on the order of dozens of megabytes, or perhaps more) if that made
server management noticeably easier.
    Mirek