On Nov 3, 2010, at 8:44 AM, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
FWIU, Major Hayden (rackerhacker on IRC) had the images uploaded
yesterday for F14 launch, and they're available to use on rackspace
cloud / slicehost already, as he's done for F13 and F12 releases.
This is what spurred this thread originally - that it would be great
for us to be marketing that F14 is available through other providers
as well.
It's not necessarily a case of "knowing the right guy" - I think it's
more than we have a Fedora enthusiast over at Rackspace, and uploading
those images happens to be part of his job. Of course, that could
theoretically become a single point of failure if he left, so I think
it would be good to have the discussion with about what the options
are to circumvent that situation. He's on this list, so I'll poke him
on IRC and see if he can provide us with some more detail.
-robyn
Robyn described my work pretty well. I'm the guy responsible for building all of the
Linux base images for Rackspace customers to use, but there are others on my team that
pitch in as well. It's also true that I'm a Fedora enthusiast. ;)
I started this discussion in IRC because although I'm glad to see traction on Fedora
on EC2 (more Fedora usage is great), there are other providers (like the one I work for)
that expend a lot of effort to provide Fedora for customers without any effort required
from the Cloud SIG or Fedora developers. However, those providers don't receive much
attention or recognition in the fashion that EC2 does[1]. I completely understand that
EC2 is extremely popular and that many cloud users think that EC2 is the only cloud
compute offering available. ;-)
Just for a little background, we've had Fedora running on Xen at Rackspace for
customers since Fedora 9. We go through thorough processes to provide a consistent
experience for users when new Fedora releases are made and we perform a large amount of
testing with new Fedora releases in our environment. While we certainly welcome outside
assistance, we don't require any help to get a new Fedora release out the door for
customers. If something's broken, we find workarounds. If it's still broken
after that, we engage the development community to find a solution.
Robyn asked this morning if building the Fedora images is one of the duties of my job, or
if it's something I do on my own time. It's a bit of both; most of our demand
surrounds Ubuntu and CentOS. Users tend to prefer Ubuntu because they find it easier to
use (I don't necessarily agree) and they prefer CentOS because of its stability.
Fedora is usually a "back-burner" item for the business but I take pride in
pushing it to the front burner when a new release is available.
Robyn also asked about the possibility of the Cloud SIG uploading a Fedora image for
customer use (as Amazon does with AMI's) and the possibility of running the Fedora
kernel. We don't offer the image upload option quite yet (but it's on the way),
but we are offering pv-grub (in beta) for customers to use whichever kernel they like
within their instance. Once that comes out of beta, we will probably build Fedora images
with pv-grub enabled and the Fedora kernel installed from the start.
As always, if there's anything else I can do for the Fedora community, I'm eager
to help!
[1]
http://press.redhat.com/2010/10/28/fedora-14-has-its-head-in-the-cloud/
--
Major Hayden