Getting official Debian images on OCI
Hi all,
I appreciate the effort that folks spent about 6 months ago getting me
up to speed with potentially bringing Debian to the OCI platform.
There's been a few other features that have had to take priority this
year[1], but conversations and work has been continuing around Debian
and the OCI platform. We are still very much interested in helping with
getting Debian onboard in some official manner. I wanted to quickly
touch base and let you know where we are with this.
To summarise the conversation from when I last reached out, we were told
for official images to be produced, we'd need to submit code to
https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-cloud-images to extend it to
create images for our platform too, similar to the existing ec2, azure,
and gce entries. That will enable you to build images within your own
infrastructure, and publish them to
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/cloud/. When I brought up the cloud
agent, it was mentioned it would need to be open sourced, and available
in the Debian repositories if we wished to have it present in the
official images. We'll also need to sync with you at some point about
getting access to the OCI Marketplace for the purposes of publishing the
images on our platform. I believe we may need to help with the code
there too?
Here's where we currently stand:
* We've started the process rolling internally with Legal to seek
permission to submit code to the cloud-images repository. I don't
entirely know how long the process will take, I may follow up with some
questions if Legal raise any that we can't answer directly. It looks
like your code is GPL v2, so I'm not anticipating any big surprises there.
* One developer has started experimenting with
https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-cloud-images over the last
few months, successfully producing internal test images with it for the
OCI platform, that can run on both Bare Metal and Virtual Machine
instances (and migrate between the two for hopefully easy vertical scaling!)
* We're working to see if we can open source the cloud agent. This has
been a general goal for the team, but it has taken a while to get to a
position where we're ready to start the ball rolling internally.
Assuming we get the go ahead, we can circle back on the subject of
packaging it for the Debian repositories. While it's strongly preferable
to have the agent in the image, as it's how you get metrics from
instances, it may not be a specific road block in the short term.
Customers can install the agent manually if needs be. As far as we can
tell from the snapcraft metrics, it looks like some customers have
already brought Debian images in as custom images on their accounts, and
have installed the agent via snapd.
I've cc'd Eric Mackay, the developer here who has done most of the
experimenting with debian-cloud-images, and Jess Sudo who is one of our
product managers.
Paul
[1] One of the features release just last week, instances based on the
Ampere Altra CPU (aarch64) has also seen some renewed interest from
customers in having Debian, which was nice validation for the work we've
been doing recently for Debian.
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