Features/FedoraOnEC2

Summary

There's a lot of outdated, ugly Fedora on EC2. Old kernels uploaded by Amazon and forgotten, random images based on that kernel created by folks who don't understand how Fedora works. It's confusing to users and bad for the Fedora brand, and if we want to see Fedora in use on the cloud, we need to step in and take responsibility for Fedora.

The goal of this feature: a process that creates Fedora EC2 images as a part of the regular Fedora release process, starting with Fedora 13.

Owner

• Name: Greg DeKoenigsberg

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 13
• Last updated: (2009-03-25)
• Percentage of completion: 25%

Open Action Items

• ACTION: jforbes continues to wrangle a kernel for us to use (Oxf13, 20:38:32)
• ACTION: jforbes will document kernel/initramfs upload process (Oxf13, 21:08:29)
• ACTION: jforbes will share upload credentials with Fedora kernel developers (Oxf13, 21:08:39)
• ACTION: gregdek will ask amazon to host srpms on s3 for fedora akis (gregdek, 21:41:48)
• ACTION: gregdek will ask amazon to host update servers for fedora (gregdek, 21:42:03)
• ACTION: gregdek will handle getting S3 setup in MirrorManager
• ACTION: gholms, ewan, gregdek will test euca2ools-1.2 in Fedora updates-testing
• ACTION: ewan to look at Ubuntu's EC2 init scripts and report back

Completed Action Items

• ACTION: huff, first pass of ks and build process for Fedora AMIs: email sent to cloud list
• ACTION: gregdek advertise availability of euca2ools in bodhi (gregdek-mobile, 21:26:55)

Detailed Description

Here's how EC2 works, in a nutshell: they have kernel images (AKIs) and machine images (AMIs). Anybody can create and upload an AMI, but only approved vendors can upload an AKI.

The most recent version of the Fedora AKI available to EC2 users is based on the Fedora 8 kernel -- because that's the last one that Amazon uploaded. Which is clearly a problem.

Lots of background discussion describing the problems can be found in the log and minutes of the Cloud SIG meeting of 2/4/2010.

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Benefits to Fedora

• Having solid, updated, maintained Fedora images on EC2 is essential for our success in the cloud world.
• Recent Fedora in EC2 will allow the Fedora Project to begin to run workloads in EC2. Build hosts, for example, could be stood up easily and cheaply in EC2 at times of great load -- mass rebuilds, for example.

Scope

• Kernels uploaded to EC2 for Fedora 12 and 13
• A process to upload kernels for each upcoming release
• A process to upload images for default spins for each release

Test Plan

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User Experience

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Dependencies

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Contingency Plan

Nothing in this plan stands in the way of the Fedora release itself -- everything is additional tools and processes. Therefore, contingency plan is to slip until we're ready to upload full images of F12 and F13, whenever that happens to be.

Documentation

Documentation and a list of currently supported AMIs are available on the Cloud SIG EC2 page.

Release Notes

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Comments and Discussions

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