Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part IV.e, “Fedora Cloud”)

This is the continuation of part four of a series based on talks at February at DevConf in the Czech Republic. This instalment is quite a bit late, given the nominally-weekly schedule, but… here we are, with Fedora Cloud.

You should start with Part I, ”Why?”, and if you enjoy the general concepts of “logical progression” and “putting the horse before the cart”, I suggest following that with Part II, “What’s Happening?” and then Part III, “Governance, Progress, and More Ideas”.

If you missed the previous Working Group reports, they’re at Part IV, a, b, c, and d; Base Design, Environments and Stacks, Fedora Server, and Fedora Workstation.

You can watch the video on YouTube, but you may find the text more helpful. I’ve summarized and paraphrased instead of just transcribing. And, since it has been three five months, I’ve included updates as we’ve moved from theory to reality.


Working Group Report Video


Fedora Cloud: Matthew Miller

Josh spoke about the Fedora Workstation product being, in some ways, the most difficult, and my first comment about Fedora Cloud is to joke that it’s the easiest, because we start with the minimal base “and then we’re done!”

atomic logoBut, really, the idea of Fedora Cloud is to see what we can provide beyond that. At DevConf, I mentioned that we were exploring the idea of integrating ostree, and since then, we have agreed and are in (sometimes frantic) progress towards making that one of our key features in Fedora 21. I also talked about a Docker host image as an out-of-the-box sort of solution (a pre-assembled Lego set, if you remember back to Part II of this series). We’ve decided to combine these two things in conjunction with the upstream Project Atomic. That project provides the plans and best practices for running containerized applications, including configuration and orchestration, and Fedora (along with RHEL and CentOS) will provide the actual implementation.

Fedora is in a great position to be the best platform for development and, in many cases, actual production use of containerized cloud apps. We have SE Linux, which provides essential security that other container hosts are just missing. (See Dan Walsh’s blog post on this subject.) Because we move quickly, we’ll have the kernel and infrastructure pieces in place first. And, because we have a whole universe of packages to draw from, we have the tools to go in the containers as well.

If you’re interested in learning more, in addition to the links above, join us in the Fedora Cloud SIG, including on the mailing list, or drop by

#fedora-cloud

on the Freenode IRC network to chat — there’s often someone there any time of day or night.

Watch for more of Part V After Flock

Sorry again for the delay. Next week is the annual Flock to Fedora conference, and there are many Fedora.next-related sessions there. Since we’ve gone from one conference to the next, I plan to just continue seamlessly from the DevConf followup into Flock followup, and we’ll see where it goes from there! I still do plan to cover the Q&A, and also do a big F.A.Q.-style wrap-up. So, stay tuned!

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2 Comments

  1. When I think about CentOS install once in a decade and Fedora, at least, 10 times in a decade I find myself in a very tight position to chose a server OS.

    • Absolutely — if you’re looking to install only once in a decade and leave it forever, Fedora isn’t your target. However, if you are looking to get the newest software, and especially if you’re interested in experimenting with new things like Atomic, Fedora is a great way to go. Especially if you are doing automated deployments of containerized applications (Docker!), you can get a lot of the advantages and upgrading (or replacing!) isn’t such a hardship.

      You can also consider doing initial testing and development on Fedora, with the goal of deploying on RHEL or CentOS 7 — or even RHEL or CentOS 8.

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