Imagefactory HVM support for EC2

Ian McLeod imcleod at redhat.com
Thu Jan 15 14:26:25 UTC 2015


On 01/14/2015 03:30 PM, John Hover wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We're heavy users of Imagefactory for building VMs to run scientific
> data processing on EC2 and on several private Openstack clusters.
> 
> Four questions:
> 
> Do you know if/when Imagefactory will begin supporting builds of
> HVM-compatible images on EC2? The newer instance types no longer support
> the PV images currently created. This is important to us because we
> often run 20000-50000 cores at a time, and getting that kind of capacity
> requires using multiple instance types.

I'd be happy to work this through.  My impression is that it should
actually be a bit easier to do HVM, since we won't have to worry about
creating pvgrub compatible configuration files.

Can you give me just a bit more detail about how you are using the
existing EC2 support?  Are you generating S3 or EBS backed images (or
both)?  Are you using the REST API or the CLI.

If you can give me a concrete example of the input to an actual build,
stripped of anything you don't wish to share externally, that would be
ideal.

> I see no traffic at all on imagefactory-devel. Is this because the real
> discussions are happening elsewhere, or is it really not a very active
> project?
> 
> Is Redhat intending to continue Imagefactory as its image authoring
> framework? I built a lot of infrastructure around Boxgrinder, only to
> have it deprecated. I hope we're not facing the same situation with
> Imagefactory.
> 
> We have several simple patches that have made things easier for us and
> might be useful to others. Do you take pull requests via github, or some
> other mechanism?

PRs on github are most welcome.

Imagefactory is now being actively used in a number of contexts and I
have every intention of continuing to develop and maintain it.

Two quick examples:

It's the backing tool that creates most of the images in Fedora's koji
instance:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/tasks?state=all&view=tree&method=image&order=-id

It's incorporated into the "toolbox" code used to generate disk images
for project Atomic:

https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree-toolbox

I apologize for the lack of mailing list traffic or other announcements
of progress.  I'm regularly reminded that communication and community
development are important and will try to do more :-).

-Ian


> 
> Thanks,
> 
> --john
> 
> 
>  --
> John Hover
> Group Leader | Grid Group/Experiment Services
> RHIC/ATLAS Computing Facility | Brookhaven National Laboratory
> jhover at bnl.gov | 631-344-5828 | http://www.racf.bnl.gov/Members/jhover
> 



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