Thoughts, comments, flames? Please add your comments to the tracking ticket: https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/75 State of the Cloud Product The first alpha for Fedora 21 is out (hooray!) and the Cloud Working Group is excited to see that the [Cloud Base and Atomic image](http://stg.fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease#cloud) are now out in the wild for your testing pleasure. Let's take a few minutes to walk through these offerings and where we're at with the Cloud product, and where we're going. And, to pique the buzzword crowd's interest, here's a spoiler – we'll be talking about Docker. First, let's take a look at what you're getting with the alpha. We have the base image, which isn't entirely new. We've offered a cloud image suitable for deployment on EC2, OpenStack, etc. for a while now. It was a "first-class citizen" in Fedora 20, and (once again) it's a major focus for the release effort. The base image is a tailored set of packages that are specially targeted at the cloud environment. These images should be an excellent base for developing and deploying services and applications in an IaaS environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or private clouds like OpenStack and Apache CloudStack. ## Atomic Base Image What's totally new in Fedora 21 is the Atomic Base Image. What's this Atomic business, you may well ask? A few months ago, [Project Atomic](http://www.projectatomic.io/) was unveiled as a community of practice to develop a platform for running Docker containers. This means having a tailored platform build from an existing operating system (e.g., Fedora), that allows "atomic" updates and has just the tools you need to run and orchestrate Docker containers. (It also should make a nifty platform for developing containers as well!) The idea is that a lot of folks now want to build apps and services using containers, but they still use general purpose OSes for many existing applications. Also, the components we need to build the Docker host OS exist in Fedora (or CentOS, or RHEL), so there's no reason to re-create the wheel in building the Docker host. Atomic uses rpm-ostree to create the Fedora Atomic image, and then allows users or admins to use rpm-ostree for updates. An update is an "atomic" unit that can rolled back in the event there's a bug or issue that impacts deployed applications. RPM is a great technology for packages, but it was only envisoned to go one way – forward. The beauty of rpm-ostree is that it lets you revert to a previous state of the host OS with a single command. It also offers some interesting additional features, like switching between trees for two different systems, but we're not offering those kinds of updates/options **yet**. The Atomic image will also feature Kubernetes, Cockpit and other orchestration tools. Those aren't quite baked for the alpha yet, but we hope to have them in by Fedora 21 final in a usable state. ## Docker, Docker, Docker? It bears mentioning that the Docker base image has been split out from the Cloud Working Group to the Base Working Group, though (obviously) we'll still be making heavy use of it in cloud environments. A big kudos to the Base Working Group folks who've taken that on and are doing great work in getting it into shape for Fedora 21. The big take-away on Docker, though, is that the Fedora 21 release will have an "official" Docker image. You can use the Fedora 21 Atomic base image with the F21 Docker image to test Docker features, or use Atomic to run Docker to test your containerized applications. ## Where We're At, Where We're Going - Join Us! As you can see, there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Cloud territory. However, we still have a lot of work to do on testing, packaging, and developing documentation for best practices. We'll have a Test Day on 1 and 2 October to kick the tires and so on, and we'd love to have a ton of Fedorans helping find bugs and problems. Have questions? Ask us on the cloud mailing list (cloud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), or in #fedora-cloud on Freenode. Or just poke one of the [Working Group Members](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Governance) and ask how you can get started. -- Joe Brockmeier | Principal Cloud & Storage Analyst jzb@xxxxxxxxxx | http://community.redhat.com/ Twitter: @jzb | http://dissociatedpress.net/
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