Document Purpose and Overview
This is the Product Requirements Document for the Fedora CoreOS Working Group. It:
- Describes use cases and design considerations for Fedora CoreOS.
Release/Product Overview
Fedora CoreOS is an automatically updating, minimal, monolithic, container-focused operating system, designed for clusters but also operable standalone, optimized for Kubernetes but also great without it.
Market Opportunity
The market around Linux containers and "microservices" architecture is growing rapidly, as are the technologies and processes that enable it. The demand for a container focused operating system that is automatically updated has been proven by Container Linux and Atomic Host. Fedora CoreOS is the successor to these distributions.
The technologies included in Fedora CoreOS for enabling transactional system updates and containerized application hosting will have relevance to other Fedora products. Currently the Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue initiatives there's an opportunity for this work group to help develop and spread these technologies to other parts of the Fedora community.
Target Market / Audience
System administrators creating containerized workloads, and organizations and users running those applications. Fedora CoreOS is particularly interested in organizations that might want to contribute back to Fedora and be involved in helping find/report/fix bugs, and develop new features.
Use Cases and Goals
Primary Use Cases
The primary use cases of Fedora CoreOS are:
- Being a Clustered Server Node for Running Kubernetes/OpenShift Origin
Fedora CoreOS aims to be one of the best platforms for running Kubernetes by making it easy to set up on a known immutable OS and working closely with upstream Kubernetes to fix bugs when they occur.
- Being a Single Server Node for Running Containerized Applications
Fedora CoreOS aims to be one of the best platforms for running single node containerized applications by offering a container runtime and automatic updates of the base OS.
Secondary Use Cases
The secondary use cases of Fedora CoreOS are:
- Clustered Server Node for Running non Kubernetes Container Orchestration Platforms
Fedora CoreOS will try to be a good platform for running DIY or other container orchestration platforms on top by providing a stable base OS and known good container runtimes.
Use Case Indifferent Goals
Fedora CoreOS is indifferent about the following use cases:
- IoT
For IoT the CoreOS group would encourage users to leverage the Fedora IoT project. If Fedora CoreOS works for IoT use cases then users are welcome to use it but it is not an explicit goal of the Fedora CoreOS group. IoT use cases will not be considered when making design decisions or future changes.
- Fedora CoreOS as a Development Platform
Developing containerized applications, containerized runtimes, or container orchestration platforms can be done on Fedora CoreOS but it is not the goal of the working group to make significant changes to the platform to enable those use cases.
Use Case Anti-Goals
There are some Use Cases for which Fedora CoreOS should not be used. These are:
- Being a Host for Running Non-Containerized Applications
Running non-containerized applications (including package layering) is not an explicit use case of Fedora CoreOS unless named as an exception.
- Being a User Desktop
For Desktop use cases the CoreOS group would encourage users to leverage the Fedora Silverblue project.
Product Objectives
The Fedora CoreOS working group will try to deliver a Fedora CoreOS distribution that:
- Automatically updates
- Delivers a small base software set (minimal, but practical), including a container runtime
- Runs on various virtual machine, bare metal, public and private cloud platforms
Delivery Mechanisms
Fedora CoreOS images must be easy to consume as part of a public or private cloud, as virtual machines, or on bare metal. Because we target these environments, we'll produce ISO images, downloadable VM/cloud images, and publish images to relevant public cloud services.
Where to obtain
All artifacts will be downloadable from the getfedora.org website. Similarly for public cloud cases users can find Fedora CoreOS in the public cloud services without having to download and upload to the cloud service themselves.
Delivery Format
Images will be delivered as AMIs on Amazon EC2, as downloadable images in qcow2 and raw.xz formats, as vagrant images, and as installable ISO images. We may add other public cloud images and other downloadable formats to meet demand or anticipated need.
Architectures
We are targeting 64-bit x86 initially, but hope to add other architectures (aarch64 and ppc64le).
Updates
Fedora CoreOS will update automatically by default. The updates will be based on the underlying OSTree technology. Updated content will be released approximately every X weeks. Updated content will be produced only for the current latest number release of Fedora and not for any previous releases of Fedora.
Measuring Success
Success looks like:
- Adoption from Container Linux and CoreOS Host users/communities
- Third party support / targeting of Fedora CoreOS as a platform.
- Increased contribution and participation in the Fedora CoreOS WG and Fedora Project in general.
- Creation of new stacks by third parties based on CoreOS or underlying technology (OSTree).
Documentation
We aim to provide a comprehensive documentation covering users to developers. Should. Provide narrative documentation to make it easier to use cloud images and use them as foundations to new products. On a volunteer basis, we will maintain a knowledge base.
Fedora Project Documentation
The CoreOS Working Group will cooperate with the Documentation Project to provide documentation to users, and developers of Fedora Cloud Products.
Open Source Projects documentation
Ensuring that Fedora is well-represented, up-to-date in other open source project documentation...
About this Document
This PRD (Product Requirements Document) is an evolving document, created by the Fedora CoreOS Working Group as part of the process for designing the Fedora CoreOS project deliverable. This document will evolve over time as the purpose of the working group continues to be determined as the working group process gets under way and initial products start to get produced.
Authors
Contributors to this document include:
Reviewers & Contributors
The following people have contributed to the development of this document, through feedback on IRC, mailing lists, and other points of contact.
Credits
The Atomic PRD was a large inspiration for this document.
Community Information
The Fedora CoreOS Working Group is one of many teams within the Fedora Project. Communication channels are listed here. Meeting/meeting log information can be found here.
Approval History
Over time, it is expected that this document will undergo various rounds of review, approval, and editing; in the future, it may be rewritten for different releases of Fedora. While one can review the history of a wiki document (by clicking the "history" tab), it is useful to provide explicit indicators of any major format changes, approvals, or indications of it being in a “final” state, in a list that can allow someone to quickly see that all of the prescribed layers of approval have occured.
- July 24, 2018 First Draft by dustymabe
- FutureDate: Approval by SomeGroup; link to any pertinent mail announcement and/or meeting minutes
Definitions and Acronyms
- AWS: Amazon Web Services
- Amazon EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a popular public IaaS, part of AWS
- IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
- PaaS: Platform as a Service
- SaaS: Software as a Service
- PRD: Product Requirements Document
- EPEL: Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux
- CI: Continuous Integration
- CD: Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment
- SCL: Software Collections
- teams in charge of some aspects of Fedora Project
- BZ: Bugzilla
- GUI: Graphical User Interface
- CLI: Command Line Interface
- API: Application Programming Interface
- FESCo: Fedora Engineering Steering Committee