BigCloudProject

The idea.

Make it incredibly easy for someone to create a Fedora Remix for a cloud-based environment, and deliver it to where they want it, or for their own personal use.

Why?

• Cloud is important. Cloud is where people are going, starting with the tinkerers and thinkers first.
• People are either going to choose to pay for an operating system, or not, when using a public cloud. Enabling them to easily configure and deploy a public cloud instance using Fedora is a good way to gain mindshare, market share, etc.
• It's a great way for people to get people familiar with Fedora as an operating system. (And some people believe that may lead to more contributors. I'm not opening that Pandora's Box of discussion in this wiki page, though. :D)

What's behind this?

BoxGrinder is an appliance maker. Essentially, it can do the following things:

• Allows you to create your own virtual appliance based on Fedora (or RHEL, or CentOS), with JEOS (Just Enough Operating System), and define what applications you want on it. You can also define things like:
  • Platform: (EC2, VirtualBox, VMWare)
  • Delivery (Where do you want it sent when it finishes building?): Local delivery, SFTP, S3, EBS, ElasticHosts)
• All of this definition goes into a .appl file, which is incredibly easy to edit.
• You can also edit other things, like partition sizes, etc.
• It can also create images for .isos.
• READ ABOUT BoxGrinder. Their wiki has lots of information.

A short few details about BoxGrinder on Amazon

Currently, on Amazon...

• You can go to the Boxgrinder AMI, copy that AMI to your Amazon instance, launch it, and it has JEOS and Boxgrinder. You run Boxgrinder, and it configures things how you want them, and then sends them where you want.
• BoxGrinder lacks a UI to do things even more simply. Yes, editing a file is easy. But what is easier is:

Making Things Easier

• Open up a web browser (either locally, or via your VM on Amazon, or via other mechanisms in future evolutions) on a machine (or VM)
• Select What You Want via a UI in the web browser:
  • I want Fedora 15, JEOS, on EC2.
  • I want to select either:
    • (easier): Drop-down a list of likely solutions / templates people would want to use. "I want Fedora to be a webserver"
    • (harder): Click through this bigger list, or click to go to the terminal and do it the Hard Way (manually, text editor)
• Please deliver it to X.
• BOOM. Fedora with what you need.

Audience

• What's the general expertise level of someone who would use this?
• Are there people who need simpler solutions? What might they be?
• Are there people who need more complex solutions? I think we all know this is yes, but how do we make sure to funnel them in the right direction?

Questions

• Does Preupgrade work in the cloud?
• How do we address short lifecycle questions?
• Can we get more than one public cloud provider?