Re: Long-overdue slides and notes from the DC13 official Debian images BoF

[Jimmy Kaplowitz <jkaplowitz@google.com>]

Can you give me an example of something an image builder has to consider for cloud but not virtual? I think for all of them you have to test in any virtual environment you want to be sure works (e.g. I've seen cases where you need specific qemu versions), sometimes install a few packages (e.g. VirtualBox guest additions or cloud-init), have a way to log in (either a default account or what Google does), etc. I'm still not seeing the difference besides Richard Stallman's atypical views on the word cloud.

- Jimmy

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Chris Fordham <chris@fordham-nagy.id.au> wrote:

On Oct 22, 2013 9:58 AM, "Jimmy Kaplowitz" <jkaplowitz@google.com> wrote:
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> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Jimmy Kaplowitz <jkaplowitz@google.com> wrote:
>>
>> Examples: If you target Amazon EC2, you'll probably pull in euca2ools and use pv-grub, set up a default user account, and soon use cloud-init. If you target Google Compute Engine, you'll probably pull in gcutil and gsutil and a few other packages, use our account management by default, temporarily use our injected kernel, in the future use the Debian kernel with a very sane boot method (I'll definitely tell this list when the details are public), and also eventually cloud-init. If you target VirtualBox, it'd be like Compute Engine but with their guest additions instead of gcutil/gsutil (unless Oracle made them non-free), no cloud-init, and account management TBD. Vanilla Qemu/Kvm would be a hybrid of the previous examples.
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> Also depending on the underlying hypervisor / kernel / emulated disk layer, you might need different device names. There's no one "most vanilla" image given that Qemu/Kvm and Xen work differently.

That is a good example of base image scope. Notice that it is specific to virtual and not cloud.