Fedora 21 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 21 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.

Fedora Workstation

GNOME 3.14

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Application Installer Continued

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Fedora Server

Anaconda Support for Server Roles

Deploying Server Roles during installation requires a higher level of access to the installed system than %post can provide. The Fedora Server offers an Anaconda plug-in that adds kickstart directives to deploy available server roles.

Cockpit Management Console

The Fedora Server offers the Cockpit Project (a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser) as available by default, providing an approachable tool for system management.

Easy to use

Cockpit is perfect for new sysadmins, allowing them to easily perform simple tasks such as storage administration, inspecting journals and starting and stopping services.

No interference

Jumping between the terminal and the web tool is no problem. A service started via Cockpit can be stopped via the terminal. Likewise, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal interface.

Multi-server

You can monitor and administer several servers at the same time.

Domain Controller Server Role

The Fedora Server is shipped with a role-deployment mechanism. One such role is to act as a primary or replica Domain Controller for the Linux machines in the network.

This is implemented by taking advantage of the FreeIPA project, packaging it up within the Server Role Framework and enabling it to be deployed through the mechanisms described in the Server Role Infrastructure.

Framework for Server Role Deployment

The Fedora Server offers a new D-BUS service for exposing available server roles, making it possible to deploy, configure and manage them. Appropriate functionality will also be exposed as a command-line utility.

Headless Java

Server installations of Fedora should usually not pull in packages related to X system or sound subsystem. For this reason part of OpenJDK package has been split into headless subpackage which has smaller dependency chain. Fedora packages should be migrated to require java-headless instead of full java package when appropriate.

OpenJDK package in Fedora has been traditionally monolithic, pulling in a lot of dependencies including (but not limited to)

libXrender
libXi
libXtst
pulseaudio

This is obviously not optimal for minimal server installations where OpenJDK is used for web application development and deployment.

Designed after Debian packaging, Fedora OpenJDK package has been split into packages providing java and java-headless. This makes it possible for packages to use "Requires: java-headless". For most libraries and generic packages this is sufficient. End-user applications should keep "Requires: java" to pull in full OpenJDK package. BuildRequires on "java-devel" are unaffected.

Fedora Cloud

Atomic Cloud Image

Fedora 21 offers a streamlined image that is designed specifically for hosting Linux containers. Built with rpm-ostree, this image includes just the packages you need to have a top-notch container host, and nothing more. It includes Docker, Kubernetes, Cockpit, cloud-init, and features "atomic" updates (and rollbacks!) using the "atomic upgrade" command.

Lightweight and task-specific, the Atomic Host is what you want for deploying apps in containers rather than by installing and configuring apps using RPM/Yum.

(A)Periodic Updates to Cloud Images

We will be releasing cloud images with latest packages in a regular basis. Since cloud images are usually short-lived, this allows new instances to be created without the overhead of applying several months' updates. This will also help us in getting security updates streamlined in the Cloud image.

Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

Space is precious in the cloud, therefore the Cloud SIG tries to keep the images' footprint as small as reasonably possible. Therefore, we split the kernel into two (plus one meta) packages. One package would contain the core modules, i.e. a minimum(-ish) set of modules to only just be able to run in virtualized environments. And another package for the rest. The 'kernel' package would then become a meta package that installs both (-core and -modules).

Convert Fedora Cloud image to Fedora Server

We now have a command line tool to convert any running Fedora Cloud instance into a Fedora Server instance. You can install the package cloudtoserver and then use the tool to convert the running instance. Example:

# cloudtoserver

You can also pass optional -d flag which disables the cloud-init service.

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