On 2015-03-18 15:38, David Gay wrote:
What are your thoughts on AMI lifetimes? That is to say, how long should EC2 AMIs exist before they're deleted? A few points to consider: - AMIs only cost us for storage, so it's not a *huge* cost to maintain a public AMI - At the same time, there are a lot of AMIs, since we build 2-4 per AWS region per build, and that number is growing - There are 9 regions now, and we have 2 virtualization types, and 2 volume types, as well (9 regions * 2 * 2 = 36 AMIs per Base image build, 18 for Atomic builds (since they are only available in HVM format)) - This total number will only grow larger as we add instance-store AMIs, and so on - This isn't even taking into account any costs we'll have once we secure a deal with other providers like HP, Rackspace, and GCE, to maintain public images on their services I propose we have some sort of discussion regarding how long cloud image builds should be available on services like AWS. I suspect this will resolve to having different lifetimes for scratch, test, RC, final, and maybe other build types.
Different clouds have different norms. AWS is a cloud where anyone can share an image with the world without having to "secure a deal" with anyone. People there are used to sifting through the resulting giant lists of images. AFAIK, that isn't the case in any of the other clouds you listed -- those all use much shorter, curated lists, so for those it may certainly make sense to prune unsupported releases after a period of time.
In AWS people seem to essentially expect images to last forever and hardcode their IDs into templates and launch configurations all over the place that will break when the image goes away, so removing them is not a decision to take lightly. The best data I am aware of for that are the MirrorManager statistics for Fedora 8, which can show how long that release remained popular after we created the Cloud SIG and began releasing newer images ourselves. Perhaps someone with the appropriate level of infrastructure log access would be able to shed some more light on that. Also keep in mind that the storage costs for AWS images are somewhat nuanced, as some images are stored compressed or sparsely, some can share storage, and so on.
Now, for pre-release images, I think rotating them out after a period of time makes sense no matter which cloud it is. Exactly how long that should be could reasonably be cloud-dependent for stuff like betas, but probably not as much for nightlies or TCs.
-- Garrett Holmstrom _______________________________________________ cloud mailing list cloud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
