[CentOS-virt] Package lists for Cloud images

Thu Oct 4 14:48:19 UTC 2012
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn <dennisml at conversis.de>

On 10/03/2012 06:29 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> hi Guys,
> 
> As we get ready to start publishing Cloud Images ( or rather images
> consumable in various virt platforms, including public and private
> clouds ) - it would be great to have a baseline package manifest worked
> out.
> 
> What / how many images should we build. At this time we were thinking of
> doing :
> 
> - CentOS-5 32bit minimal
> - CentOS-6 32bit minimal
> 
> - CentOS-5 64bit minimal
> - CentOS-6 64bit minimal
> 
> - CentOS-5 64bit LAMP
> - CentOS-6 64bit LAMP
> 
> What would be the minimal functional requirements people would expect
> from these images ? and what rpms should be installed ? Should root
> login be enabled or should we require people to go in via a 'centos'
> user. Should the image be self-updating, or should we have a post-login
> message that indicates outstanding updates ?

Have you considered equipping these with cloud-init? While i don't have any
practical experience with myself yet it should allow to build a minimal
image yet allow the creation cutomized flavors for users.

The problem I see is that the moment you include say vim-enhanced instead
of emacs or postfix instead of sendmail you'll get into a political fight.

The only way I see is to make the minimal images truly as minimal as
possible and then allow people to pull in stuff using cloud-init (or
alternative mechanisms).

Regards,
  Dennis