I've spent the last 3+ years asking people what they would like from a guest operating system in the cloud. Sometimes framed as "Why did you choose Fedora?", sometimes as "Why didn't you choose Fedora?", and sometimes basically the generic question. I'd say that overall, the reason people say that they chose what they did was either familiarity, or that they found documentation — or another person — doing a similar thing, and they just followed whatever OS that had. When I ask what they *want*, though, there's a somewhat different story. It's pretty universal, though: a small, simple base without much risk, and a library of components to go on top of that. Fedora Cloud Base is a decent job of being a small base, although we still have a lot of dependency bloat and updates churn. But the library of stuff — languages, services — is difficult. We've got a great set of packages, but they're largely irrelevant, because the versions are usually changing too quickly. Mostly, you've got to bring your own stacks. I'd hoped that we could answer this by slimming down the base and then offering a wide selection of SCLs on top. But, I don't think that's really panning out. The base is way less minimal than I'd like, and I don't know a good way to manage the updates situation. And SCLs are both still somewhat stuck *and* unlikely to explode (in the good sense) if they get unstuck. For people who chose Fedora Cloud already — familiarity, or they found someone else familiar — we're probably okay. No one has anything negative to say about the work we've done — in fact, people who have chosen it generally say good things. I think it's very useful to keep producing Fedora Cloud Base for that group. But... it's a small club. So, enter Atomic Host plus containers. This is, basically, exactly what people have been asking for. The ostree tech brings some order to the base, making updates more reliable and testable. And containers bring us the library of components — at the very least making it easier to bring your own, and ideally providing a new, better way for us to offer different versions, possibly with a different lifecycle. That's why I'd like to move the Cloud Base image to a dedicated cloud.fedoraproject.org page along the lines of http://arm.fedoraproject.org, and replace Cloud with Atomic Host as a top level on <https://arm.fedoraproject.org/>, and to rename Cloud WG to Atomic WG (but still keeping the Cloud SIG to work on the Base image). This is all just my 2¢, but I hope you'll consider them 2¢ with a lot of prior listening. If you have a counter story which will help us significantly grow adoption of Cloud Base *instead*, I'd love to hear it. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ cloud mailing list cloud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
