Should we include images templates with next major release?

Justin Clift jclift at redhat.com
Mon Dec 3 15:24:58 UTC 2012


On 03/12/2012, at 3:02 PM, Tomas Sedovic wrote:
> On 12/03/2012 01:26 PM, Justin Clift wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> We have slowly-developing upstream repo of image templates for the existing
>> Aeolus:
>> 
>>   https://github.com/aeolus-incubator/templates
>> 
>> When we do the next major Aeolus release, it would be useful to include them
>> "already bundled" in some useful way.
> 
> Very much so. Heat has been doing this from the start and it's been very helpful to newcomers (users, developers and potential users evaluating the tool).
> 
> I would actually go a step further and offer not only templates but deployables as well. I know we can make a trivial deployable from a given template so this would be for showing off more complex stuff: multi-instance deployments, launch-time parameters and provisioning, etc.
> 
> We can put them in the Default (or Sample) catalog and have Conductor immediately useful.
> 
> Bundling sample deployables will be more difficult because they need to contain specific image IDs in order to be launchable, but I still think it's a good idea to do.

Yeah, the "need a specific image ID in deployables" is a sticking point that
I'm not yet sure how to work around either.


>> To make it practical though, a few things would need to happen:
>> 
>>  + Update them to use CentOS 6.x
>> 
>>    The templates are using various versions of Fedora at the moment, some
>>    F16, some F17, etc.
>> 
>>    CentOS 6.x is one of the primary "supported" platforms for next
>>    upstream release, whereas F16 will be completely EOL soon.  So we're
>>    probably best to update the templates for CentOS 6.  Won't have to
>>    update them every 6 months after that. ;)
> 
> I agree. We should provide some Ubuntu images as well. It will serve two purposes:
> 
> 1. we show that we do in fact support Ubuntu guests as a first-class OS
> 2, a significant portion of the upstream developers use and are familiar with Ubuntu
> 
> If we offer their LTS releases, we would only have to update the templates every two year.

Good idea. :)


>>  + Figure out how to bundle them in said "useful way"
>> 
>>    + Should they be pulled down by dev-tools, and placed on the
>>      filesystem at suitable location?
>> 
>>    + Should they be pre-populated in Conductor?
> 
> If we don't do this, the benefit will be very limited. If you have to add the templates to Conductor manually, you gain little over getting them from GitHub -- especially since you can already add the templates via URL.

I suppose the "optimal" way to do this, would be have dev-tools add
the images/deployables using the up-and-coming Conductor API.  I'm
unsure if that will have the needed functionality in time though.

If it doesn't, we might have to somehow inject them directly into
the database.  Sounds a bit more prone to breakage though.

+ Justin

--
Aeolus Cloud Evangelist
http://www.aeolusproject.org




More information about the aeolus-devel mailing list