mattdm
For that, we need the Cloud Base to have *internal* visibility and
connections, but it doesn't need to confuse the marketing message.
I think moving the focus of Cloud SIG to focus on Atomic would confuse folks more than the currently slim messaging around the Cloud SIG goals. I think CentOS has the right approach with a separate Atomic SIG, and I propose that we follow that model. Split Atomic into it's own SIG, continue the Cloud SIG to focus on cloud things.
Atomic is a new way of doing everything. OS management changes, package management changes, Docker + K8S + Nulecule + Atomicapp + ? + ? + ?. We are trying to move at a much more rapid pace than the rest of the Fedora Project products (see the 2 week release proposal). We are breaking things at a much more rapid pace than other products as well. Lots of initial answers on ask / IRC wind up as, "update the tree see if it's still broken".
I don't think that if you say the word "cloud" in a room of IT folks today, that over 1% are going to think Atomic. They think OpenStack, OpenShift, CloudFoundry, Eucalyptus, AWS, ownCloud, etc. Fedora as foundation, Fedora as tenant, Fedora as a Service! The new Cloud SIG draft reflects those use cases:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_SIG-new-draft. Fedora saying "well when *we* say cloud we mean Atomic not what you think" and having to explain it doesn't sound like a win.
And while there's overlap in uses like cloud-init, Atomic is much more likely to want a completely new compatible implementation because the dependency tree makes maintenance more complex than a Fedora OpenStack guest image will need to care about. (See my previous rants on sizing ;-) ). Or a Fedora Server optimized for running nova-compute. The Cloud Base Image and the Atomic host or the Docker Base Image don't and shouldn't have much in common because the use cases are different.
I do think that the Cloud SIG does need better messaging about its intents and goals. The new SIG draft looks like a step in the right direction to me. Define major focus areas (run IaaS on Fedora, run Fedora in IaaS, etc) then layer in use cases and projects from the group.
A new Atomic SIG would focus on stabilizing the Atomic host, the delivery process, and the Docker base image. Atomic hosts are all about running Docker workloads, so that makes sense to couple. As containerization grows, I could see the need for moving Docker image management somewhere else.