On Wed, 19.09.12 14:10, Matthew Miller (mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > If any of this sounds interesting, please come on over to the Cloud SIG, > centered around the mailing list > > <https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/cloud> > > and pitch in. And if the words "strategic" and "planning" make your eyes > glaze over, don't worry. This is going to be a *doing* thing, not just a > *talking* thing. Computing as a whole is _really_ at one of those big > inflection points, and it's going to take a lot of action to bring us on > over to the other side — where we've got a *lot* to contribute that the > world shouldn't miss out on. I think there are two crucial requirements to make Fedora fun in the cloud: a) We should regularly test Fedora in containers. Containers are a core feature to allow cloud providers overcommit their resources more drastically. I spent some time on making systemd boot up relatively cleanly in an nspawn/libvirt-lxc container (simply because it makes it easier for me to debug systemd), but that's just systemd and not the whole distro and right now it's a lot more fun to run systemd in a Debian container on Fedora than on systemd in a Fedora container on Fedora (audit...). If Fedora cares for the cloud, then we probably should declare container boots something that is on the level on a "release architecture", by which I mean that it is regularly tested and a requirement for release. This really is an area where some pressure could be needed. The systemd test suite actually builds an OS image that is booted once inside of kvm, and once in nspawn, to make sure we get everything right in systemd, and that the very same image can be booted both ways unaltered and entirely stateless. I'd like to see a similar level of testing in all of Fedora, too. b) We should try much harder to lower the resource cost per container. If cloud providers need less disk space, less CPU, and less memory per container, then this allows them to run much more containers on one system. And that translates directly to cash for them. For one this means we should try much harder to reduce the minimal installation set of packages of Fedora. And that probably means regularly posting blame lists (whose packages pull in 100MB more this time? Who is the king of adding new dependencies?) and having somebody who really invests the work in splitting up packages to minimize deps. But it also means running services more often by activation on demand (socket primarily). i.e. if a cloud provider wants to grant SSH access to customers for their individual containers he shouldn't have to run one sshd per container, but should just have the socket listening. i.e. having 5000 sockets listening on a machine is relatively cheap. Running 5000 sshd instances on a machine is quite expensive. In summary: I believe that containers are a big part of being awesome in the cloud. And right now running Fedora inside a container is not that great an experience. It kinda works, but it's very very rough around the edges. Yes, I know I should have subscribed to the ML and posted that there, but I am soooo lazy to do that for one mail only... I apologize. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
