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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">When using on-demand instantiation of virtual machines in cloud computing,<br>users pass configuration data to the cloud and that data is used for<br>configuring the instances.</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><br>This process is called contextualization. Contextualization includes<br>identity(users, groups), network, system services and disk configuration.</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><em><a href="https://github.com/tmrts/flamingo">Flamingo</a></em> is a contextualization tool that is being developed as a GSoC project</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">that aims to handle early initialization of cloud instances.</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><br></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">The current de facto standard for instance virtualization is <a href="https://launchpad.net/cloud-init" target="_blank" data-mce-href="https://launchpad.net/cloud-init" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">cloud-init</a>.<br>However, there are some problems with it. The most prominent ones are:</p><ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><li>The usage of a scripting language (<em>Python</em> in this case), since scripting<br>languages have the overhead of the interpreter, its dependencies and<br>being slower than compiled ones due to their dynamic nature.</li><li>The documentation is lacking at best. There are examples of common<br>use-cases. However, most of the code-base and plug-ins are undocumented.<br>Inspecting the code-base is a prerequisite to extend the functionality or<br>even understand it.</li><li>Test coverage is low. Making it hard to extend, maintain, and improve.</li></ul><div><font color="#333333" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Bitstream Charter, Times, serif"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br></span></font></div><div style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><font color="#333333" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Bitstream Charter, Times, serif"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><i>Flamingo</i> is a replacement for cloud-init that solves these issues.</span></font></div><div style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><font color="#333333" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Bitstream Charter, Times, serif"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><br></span></font></div><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><em>Flamingo</em> aims to solve the following problems encountered in cloud contextualization;</p><ul style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><li>Speed</li><li>Dependency</li><li>Maintainability</li><li>Extensibility</li></ul><div><font color="#333333" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Bitstream Charter, Times, serif"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br></span></font></div><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">The current focus of <em>Flamingo</em> is <a href="http://www.projectatomic.io/" target="_blank" data-mce-href="http://www.projectatomic.io/" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Atomic Host</a> and <a href="https://www.centos.org/">CentOS</a></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><br></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">Current work-in progress is to build test images that are using Flamingo instead of cloud-init as the</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">contextualization tool for EC2, GCE, Openstack, and OpenNebula.</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><em><br></em></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">You can find the source code for the tool <a href="https://github.com/tmrts/flamingo" target="_blank" data-mce-href="https://github.com/tmrts/flamingo" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">here</a>.</p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><br></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">For more details please check this <a href="http://tmrts.com/post/flamingo" target="_blank" data-mce-href="http://tmrts.com/post/flamingo" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">blog post</a></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><br></p><p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;">Feel free to make suggestions or ask questions.</p> </div></body>
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