[CentOS-virt] AWS AMI questions

Thu Aug 1 13:12:39 UTC 2013
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Hi,

On 08/01/2013 03:22 AM, CS wrote:
> Just one comment about the raindrops project; having it as a closed
> source project that's separate from the official CentOS project, and has
> no recognizable organization behind, makes it hard to use in any sizable
> company. Inevitably there would be questions about security and
> verification of what is in the build, risk of being dependent on a
> project that may or may not be around in a few years. If it were open
> source, or perhaps under the CentOS brand, that would make it easier to
> use. Just an fyi...
> 

Couple of things : projectraindrops.net runs completely disconnected
from CentOS Project - there is no resource overlap other than the fact
that I wrote some of the scripts behind it - and I do the same for
centos.org as well. That is by design. Couple of wins in there is that
we can build Fedora and Debian images as well at Raindrops, which we
cant in the private instance that runs inside the CentOS buildservices[1].

Also, the code behind it is basically just libvirt running kickstarts
that users submit in native hypervisors. so the only bit that isnt
already visible is the web interface ( which is sinatra running a few
tasks to prep data for virt-install ).

Finally, one of the things that I want to get to is being able to
download a project raindrops VM that is already setup for a target
environ: eg. click a button to have your own instance come up in AWS/EC2
or download something that can run as a in-cloud-off-premise openstack
vm or opennebula vm. I guess this is really what your request was about
: and its something that is in the pipelines, blocker is mostly hours in
a day, but I hope to have this done by the end of this year.

Flipping over to the other side : AWS is a vendor environment, we try
quite hard to not be a vendor specific effort and try to keep things as
generic as possible. AWS for years refused to accept that CentOS was an
entity or that CentOS images were in demand ( the first set of
conversations I had with them was back in 2008... and it took till 2013
to get that issue resolved ). In this case the resolution was them
acknowledging that we exist, that the content we churn out is acceptable
as is; essentially reducing ( but not removing ) the hostility that AWS
has towards open source projects at large.

And we on the other hand need to be careful about how we interface with
them, and what that interface brings in and takes away from our side.
After all, it might be a specific vendor environment - its still quite a
large one.

Hope this helps clear up a bit more of the air,

- KB

[1]: Since centos buildsys has no inbound content, we could / would not
be able to expose that interface in a manner that would allow other
distro's content to be consumed in a sane manner.

-- 
Karanbir Singh
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
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