Fedora 20 talking points

DISCUSSION DRAFT
This is a draft only for discussion. This is not a final set of talking points, nor are all of the features listed here complete at the time of this draft. Please do a reality check before using these talking points as anything other tnan a discussion draft!

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 20 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release, and to help drive content for the release, etc.

The talking points are based in part on the Change Set for this release.

Themes for the Release

What's the overall "theme" or set of themes for the Fedora 20 release? The Fedora 20 release happens to coincide (roughly) with 10 years of Fedora. After a decade of development, the Fedora 20 release represents the evolution of the project so far and the features that are emphasized in this release say something about the priorities of this community after all that time.

So what are the themes for this Fedora release? If you look over the ChangeSet for F20, it may be a bit opaque to the outside observer what the release actually "means."

Fedora 10th Anniversary

The release of Fedora 20 coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Fedora Project. Now is a good time to look back at the history of the project, its accomplishments, how the project has grown, and where it's going in its second decade.

Improving Fedora as a Platform (Maturity)

Fedora 20 is an inflection point for the Fedora community. This release includes many small improvements that indicate maturing technologies that are crucial to the Fedora Project, as well as the larger Linux community.

NetworkManager Improvements

NetworkManager is getting several improvements in Fedora 20 that will be welcome additions for power users and system administrators.

Users will now be able to add, edit, delete, activate, and de-activate network connections via the nmcli command line tool, which will make life much easier for non-desktop uses of Fedora.

NetworkManager is also getting support for bonding interfaces and bridging interfaces. Bonding and bridging are used in many enterprise setups and are necessary for virtualization and fail-over scenarios.

No Default Sendmail, Syslog

Fedora 20 removes some services that many users find unnecessary, though (of course) they will remain available as installable packages for users who might need them.

The systemd journal now takes the place as the default logging solution, having been tested and able to manage persistent logging in place of syslog.

Also, Sendmail will no longer be installed by default, as most Fedora installs have no need of a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).

ARM as a Primary Architecture

While Fedora has supported a number of hardware architectures over the years, x86/x86_64 has been the default for the majority of Fedora users and for the Linux community in general.

ARM, however, has been making massive strides. It already dominates the mobile market, and is becoming a go-to platform for hobbyists and makers, and is showing enormous promise for the server market as well.

In keeping with Fedora's commitment to innovation, the Fedora community has been pushing to make ARM a primary architecture to satisfy the needs of users and developers targeting the ARM platform.

Cloud and Virtualization Improvements

The Fedora 20 release continues the Fedora tradition of adopting and integrating leading edge technologies used in cloud computing. This release includes a number of features that will make working with virtualization and cloud computing much easier.

Visible Cloud

Visible Cloud

(Name needs changing)

The IT world is in the middle of a significant shift to cloud-based infrastructure. We've put significant work into making the cloud image a solid technical base, and we'd like to reflect that in how we present it to users.

The rapidly-moving startup companies and developers focused on building in the cloud are a natural userbase for Fedora. Presenting the cloud image as a top-level part of Fedora will accelerate our growth in an area that is already rapidly growing.

OS Installer Support for LVM Thin Provisioning

OS Installer Support for LVM Thin Provisioning

LVM has introduced thin provisioning technology, which provides greatly improved snapshot functionality in addition to thin provisioning capability. This change will make it possible to configure thin provisioning during OS installation.

VM Snapshot UI with virt-manager

This feature will make taking VM snapshots much easier. qemu and libvirt have all the major pieces in place for performing safe VM snapshots/checkpoints, however there isn't any simple discoverable UI. This feature will track adding that UI to virt-manager, and any other virt stack bits that need to be fixed/improved. This includes adding functionality to libvirt to support deleting and rebasing to external snapshots.

Vagrant Support

Vagrant Support

Vagrant is an automation tool used to manage development environments using virtualization and configuration management tools. It allows developers and teams to work on their projects and test them in an environment similar to production. Historically, Vagrant had a dependency on VirtualBox, but the newer versions have a plugin system allowing it to work with other virtualization technologies, including KVM.

Role based access control with libvirt

Changes/Virt_ACLs

Libvirt role based access control will allow fine grained access control like 'user FOO can only start/stop/pause vm BAR', but for all libvirt APIs and objects.

ARM on x86 with libvirt/virt-manager

Changes/Virt_ARM_on_x86

Fix running ARM VMs on x86 hosts using standard libvirt tools libvirt virsh, virt-manager and virt-install.

Developer Goodness

Web Assets

Web Assets

(Needs renaming)

Traditionally, Fedora has been pushing bits from its various servers to people's browsers in an ad-hoc fashion, and issues surrounding JavaScript have been swept under the rug. This change proposal provides a simple framework for shipping static web content and a way forward to treat JavaScript more closely to other code in the distribution.

Ruby on Rails 4.0

Ruby on Rails 4.0

This update will keep Fedora up-to-date and will ensure that the current Ruby on Rails developers stay with us as they will get support for system-packaged Ruby on Rails of the latest version. Apart from that, Rails 4.0 also bring improved functionality, speed. security and better modularization.

Wildfly 8

Wildfly 8

The WildFly 8 Application Server (formerly JBoss Application Server), a very popular Java EE platform. WildFly is a very fast, modular and lightweight server. WildFly makes it easy to run and manage cluster of servers with many applications deployed.

Snapshot and Rollback Tool

Snapshot and Rollback Tool

This will provide a major benefit to Fedora developers who tend to run the latest-and-greatest (such as on Rawhide). It will allow them to save the state of their system at a time where everything is working and experiment with newer features with the confidence that if things are seriously broken they will be able to restore to a working state. Additionally, this will be useful for anyone running Fedora as a server, as it provides them with a cleaner guarantee for returning to a working state after an update with regressions than 'yum history' is capable of accomplishing.

Perl 5.18

Perl 5.18

Perl doesn't get as much attention these days, but it's still a vital part of many production and development environments. Fedora will deliver the most up-to-date Perl release so its users will be able to stay current with the latest Perl.