Eucalyptus Cloud infrastructure and kernels/initrds
Dear release team,
since today, we have Eucalyptus in the archive, which
is a Free clone of the Amazon Web Services for computing
and storage. Stefano wants to tag Squeeze as "cloud
ready", and, frankly, for the very exact moment nobody
really knows what this is supposed to mean.
The bottleneck for the selection of Debian as a cloud
OS (at least for the AWS clouds) is the offering of
some certified kernel and root images, from which one
then jumps into "the rest" of Squeeze. Amazon restricts
that, with Eucalyptus there is no such restriction,
in principle. But every cloud provider will need to
do just a bit of work to get the latest Debian release
into an EMI that could then be run.
So Debian is cloud ready already with
the advent of Eucalyptus in sid. But there is more to
it, like the synchronisation of releases with cloud
images. We are preparing for such an automated
synchronisation, but how much of that is automated
and how that is triggered, we don't really know for
the moment. Also we don't know if we need to plan
for any mirroring or if we can start with a single
site to offer immediately cloudifiable images.
The folks@Eucalyptus are very busy with getting some
new release out these days. Once this gets better,
we would like to discuss together with you about
what we would need to do to make your team happy
when you see Debian "Squeeze" images offered.
"Happy" I expect to mean that you rest assured that
security updates get in, that no wrong compromises have
been done to the kernel, that ... well, to gather
such expectations is really what we need to do.
Upstream is very open towards Debian, actually an
official partnership is considered by both sides,
all postponed a bit until the situation at Eucalyptus
becomes less stressful again. We have Daniel
already accepted as a DM, Chris and Kyo are
expected to come, too. I expect Chris and Daniel to
be the ones to be working the closest with you on
a technical level while for organisatorial bits
there may also be Shashi.
I hope you share the joys of Eucalyptus' advent
in Debian as much as we do. With my Debian Med hat
on I see the beginning of a collaboration not only
on the packages themsleves, but also on the
preparation of complete environments to actually
do work with those tools. This will give our
society a very different touch, we are likely to
become even more of a "knowledge collector" than
we already are today. With all modesty, I don't
see how any commercial Linux distro could compete
with that (except for founding Fedora or OpenSuSE,
possibly). So, the clouds together with the community
behind the Blends may be really exploiting the
advantages of the large number of packages that
Debian offers.
I'll postpone an email to debian-devel for a week or
two until the workload at Eucalyptus allows upstream
to join the thread on that more public list.
Best regards,
Steffen
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