RE: Any thought given to building a Debian-Edu/Skolelinux optimized for a Cloud computing environment ??
Hello Brian,
Regarding your early question to Peter concerning our activity level:
> Dec 2007 seems like a long stretch... how active is the Skolelinux
> community in supporting the software?
You'd may get an indication by the traffic on this list and judge for
yourself:
Archives are available at http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/
and few other locations.
I took a while to look into that stuff you brought up as this is all new to
me, just the introductory matter no in depth research so I'm still quite
ignorant.
[Brian Mullan - Monday, June 15, 2009 6:15 PM]
> NCREN now connects all 115 school districts in the state which means
> the next problem is how to provide compute resources to 2.3Mil kids.
>
> I've been spending a lot of time using Amazon Web Services Cloud
> architecture (AWS <http://aws.amazon.com/> ) in some experiments for
> K-12 support.
>
> Recently, I found SkoleLinux <http://www.skolelinux.org/en/> and was
> wondering if there has been any thought to building an optimized
> Debian-Edu/SkoleLinux Amazon Machine Image (AWS EC2 compute service
> AMI virtual appliances) ?
I'm relatively new to Debian-Edu myself, but a search on this list's
archives suggests that this subject hasn't been discussed here yet.
http://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/search?query=AWS+EC2+%22Amazon+Web+Services%
22+%22Cloud+architecture%22+%22cloud-computing%22&DEFAULTOP=or&author=&list=
debian-edu&sort=relevance&HITSPERPAGE=10&language=en
> Not sure if you've thought of this idea....
>
> What if Debian-Edu/SkoleLinux were to produce an optimized Server &
> Client (LTSP, or Desktop Linux) and host the Server & Desktop on
> Amazon EC2/S3 cloud? Then anywhere AWS supports (primarily Europe
> & America)
> communities could initiate Debian-Edu/SkoleLinux servers (maybe
> clients also) at very low costs and much less complexity.
>
> Just an idea.. as AWS Education in the Cloud offer recently was
> pretty cool:
This is an interesting idea, thanks.
I view this as a deployment option that may serve as a logical progression
or an alternative for large centralized sites at a municipal scale and up.
It seems that to make use of this approach an institute needs wideband -wide
as a barn- internet access, such as provided by your NCREN, while we still
try to cater even for those with no internet access at all.
This together with geographical restrictions, as you mentioned, greatly
limits the availability of that option.
To actually make it happen there has to be a person interested enough and
able to carry it out.
As a deployment it's kind of out the scope of Debian-Edu, yet support and
help for such an effort is certainly appropriate, like for any on-land site.
Viewed this way, I think it doesn't conflict with free software guidelines.
If you're interested in pursuing this course farther, feel free to discuss
it here (on list) and perhaps make use of the Debian-Edu infrastructure,
such as the wiki or svn repository, to document your progress and enable
cooperation.
At the moment some of us are concentrating on getting the next release
finalized and out, therefore may be less responsive.
If you'd care to elaborate on that subject here are some points to address:
* Overlap of AWS with main/ltsp services-
- How are users and resources managed in the clouds?
- What services of our main server are required, and which are useless?
- Are there benefits for using ltsp over workstation AMI?
* Netboot-
- How may stateless clients access the services?
- Is there a need for some sort of mediator on site?
* Development, optimization and testing-
- Can it be done using QEMU/VirtualBox/Xen locally?
- What is optimization for EC2? Is it same as for Xen?
* Economy and cost-
- Can you support the claim of "very low cost"?
- Is there a model for comparing alternatives?
Just somethings to chew on ;)
So long, Odd.
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