Announcing the Fedora Cloud SIG

Maybe a little prematurely, but hey, we’ve got a mailing list, and at some point we’ll claim some Fedora wiki space.  Right now, though, it’s a bunch of blah de blah blah.

Here’s the kickoff email I sent to the list.  If it appeals to you, please join the list and enter the conversation.  (Sure, you can comment on the blog, but really, I’d much rather if you join the list.)

* * *

As has been pointed out, “cloud” is a very large topic.  Which means that, IMO, there are two directions we can go on this list that are not mutually exclusive: long-winded, bloviating discussions about what we *could* do, and detailed plans for what we *will* do.

Let’s focus on the second for now, since the first is going to happen anyways.

There are many potential cloud goals that we could be tackling, but I believe that a lot of people would agree with this proposed initial goal:

LET’S CREATE FEDORA EC2 IMAGES THAT DON’T SUCK.

🙂

Right now we face a dilemma:

• The latest Fedora kernel available on Amazon EC2 is Fedora 8;
• Various people are creating “Fedora images” based on that AKI;
• Confusion results;
• Which (a) doesn’t work and (b) gives Fedora a bad name in the process.

We have an opportunity to fix this.  Justin Forbes has been working with some folks at Amazon to make this better, and it looks like we’ll have an “official” account that will allow us to do something clever, like put a Gold Star next to “official” Fedora EC2 images.

Once we actually get them up and running, of course.  Which, painted in broad strokes, maybe looks something like this:

1. Getting a basic image uploaded and working for anybody (Justin is on this, but maybe could use some help?);

2. Getting a basic image uploaded and working for everybody (which means coordinating a testing account for Fedora people to use free-of-charge, which we have funding for, and then finding actual people to test);

3. Getting that basic image created as part of the Fedora release process (which was discussed at FUDCon, but I don’t know if any of those conversations continued);

4. Providing proper tools for people to create their own images, since creation of a custom “spin” is basically an essential activity in the cloud.

It may be that some of this activity is going on already, and that’s a large part of what this SIG is about: to find those people and get them talking in one place, away from the clutter of fedora-devel and other lists.  So if you’re working on tools that will help with this goal, by all means, speak up.

And now, a few questions.

• For Justin.  How’s your current image looking?  Does it work well enough for other folks to try it out?  If not, what’s the issue, and can anyone help?
• For everyone.  Have you played with EC2 yet?  If not, do you have a side project that could benefit from its use, that furthers the goals of Fedora / free software / etc., and are willing to test our images?  If so, let us know — we’ve got an account for this purpose, and can send you the info needed to get started.  Even if we don’t have the latest Fedora up yet, there are plenty of images that you can play with to get a sense of how EC2 works.
• For everyone.  Would an IRC meeting to talk through some of this stuff be useful — sort of a kickoff where everyone takes an hour out of their life to think about all this — or should we stick to the mailing list for now?