Re: Official Debian image request: Google Compute Engine (was: Re: Please let's not talk about "clouds")

Niltze, all!

Being interested in Debian cloud instances and having deployed/used Debian on different providers, including CloudSigma, RackSpace, HPCloud, & SingleHop, I was quite interested in this thread.

As wheezy release approaches, I tried to give the Google Compute (Cloud) Engina a spin.

I git cloned the repo at https://github.com/google/build-debian-cloud in a machine with Debian Wheeze/Sid and:

./build-debian-cloud gce --codename wheezy --filesystem xfs --timezone PST --name Metztli

The image builds, so I assume it works as well. Did not try it because GCE requires a $400 investment up front.

From my perspective an elastic cloud fabric that enables virtualized instances to be migrated to-and-from the users' local/personal computer (and not only from a private/hybrid cloud in an enterprise datacenter) to the public cloud of a vendor would be would be 'cool'.

Anyhow, the code from your gitHub repo for the AWS & GCE Debian effort builds a debian-wheezy-20130504.tar.gz file containing a disk.raw image.

I like the fact that Debian is being deployed on leading edge technology paradigms as the cloud.

Best Professional Regards.

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Jimmy Kaplowitz <jkaplowitz@google.com> wrote:

Hi Charles,

Sorry for the slow response to this mail. The build command I'm using is simply sudo ./build-debian-cloud --codename squeeze or sudo ./build-debian-cloud --codename wheezy, from the top level of a checkout of https://github.com/google/build-debian-cloud or Anders' upstream repository (no unmerged changes exist right now). The code supports auto-upload and auto-image-add, but I'm not using either feature right now (auto-image-add also has some bugs for my setup). The commands after that would be something like this:

# Upload the image. For this command, the bucket inside Google Cloud Storage can live anywhere, it doesn't matter and becomes irrelevant to an image once gcutil addimage runs.
# I currently have mine in the debian-cloud project but it doesn't have to be. I might move it to the debian-cloud-experiments project, or anywhere else.
gsutil cp debian-squeeze-20130502.tar.gz gs://jkaplowitz_gce_debian/debian-6_0_7-squeeze-v20130502.tar.gz

# Create the image for testing purposes.
gcutil --project=debian-cloud-experiments addimage debian-6-squeeze-v20130502 --description="Debian 6.0.7 squeeze, built on 2013-05-02" gs://jkaplowitz_gce_debian/debian-6_0_7-squeeze-v20130502.tar.gz --preferred_kernel=projects/google/global/kernels/gce-v20130325

# Perform some testing before publishing to all Google Compute Engine customers, as we are providing a way for them to automatically pick the latest debian-cloud squeeze and wheezy images. The minimal example here confirms basic SSH functionality and cleans up after itself.

gcutil --project=debian-cloud-experiments addinstance debian-6-squeeze-v20130502-$USER-test --image=projects/debian-cloud/global/images/debian-7-v20130502 --zone=us-central1-b --machine_type=n1-standard-1

gcutil ssh debian-6-squeeze-v20130502-$USER-test
gcutil --project=debian-cloud-experiments deleteinstance debian-6-squeeze-v20130502-$USER-test
# Delete the test image.
gcutil --project=debian-cloud-experiments deleteimage debian-6-squeeze-v20130502
# Publish the image for real.
gcutil --project=debian-cloud addimage debian-6-squeeze-v20130502 --description="Debian 6.0.7 squeeze, built on 2013-05-02" gs://jkaplowitz_gce_debian/debian-6_0_7-squeeze-v20130502.tar.gz --preferred_kernel=projects/google/global/kernels/gce-v20130325

We've slightly tweaked the naming convention to have both number and codename and to avoid underscores (apparently not allowed), but I'll send a separate mail about our last-minute tweaks.

Feel free to list us in the cloud team wiki page. I've been meaning to do it myself but haven't yet signed in to the Debian wiki on the computers I use when I focus on this effort. I'll fix that soon. :)

- Jimmy

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> wrote:

Le Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 01:50:48AM -0700, Jimmy Kaplowitz a écrit :

>
> * The images are built with Anders' script build-debian-cloud
> (https://github.com/andsens/build-debian-cloud), which was called
> ec2debian-build-ami until we worked with him to add Google Compute
> Engine support.

Hi Jimmy and David,

build-debian-cloud is easy to use, but I found useful the command-line snippet
on http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image/Squeeze, that describes how to
prepare the image for the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud. Could you paste one
(or send to the list so that one of us can paste), for the Google Compute
Engine pages ?

By the way, do you mind if I add your names to http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Cloud
(or please go ahead if you would like to add them yourselves).

Have a nice day,

--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan

--
Jose R R
http://www.metztli-it.com
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