Agreed, Chatting earlier today on #cloud-init about all of this I think scott convinced me that maybe we (the joint we in the community at large) should think about asking ourselves what do we really want a guest agent for/to do?
If it's for software installation or user management then aren't puppet, chef, juju (lots of others) good enough? If it's for tracking what a vm is doing, aren't there many existing tools for this already (sounds like monitoring to me). Is there a good list of what people really want out of a guest agent (something unique that only a guest agent can do/is best at). If there is one and it was already posted, my fault (I am on my iPhone which is not best for emails...) Sent from my really tiny device... > On Dec 6, 2013, at 11:37 PM, "Clint Byrum" <cl...@fewbar.com> wrote: > > Excerpts from Joshua Harlow's message of 2013-12-06 12:27:10 -0800: >> Another idea that I'll put up for consideration (since I work with the >> cloud-init codebase also). >> >> Cloud-init[1] which currently does lots of little useful initialization >> types of activities (similar to the racker agents activities) has been >> going through some of the same questions[2] as to should it be an agent >> (or respond to some type of system signal on certain activities, like new >> network metadata available). So this could be another way to go. >> >> Including (ccing) scott who probably has more ideas around this to :-) >> >> [1] https://launchpad.net/cloud-init >> [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cloud-init/+bug/1153626 > > I have a theory that cloud-init is so popular and useful precisely > becuase it does _not_ expand into ongoing-management territory. It is > really amazing at "setting the table" for instances when you choose > not to do image based software deployment. Even if you do image based > deployment, it is really great for abstracting away all the cloud details > and customizing an instance. > > The problem with conflating those two tasks is that early boot > configuration carries quite a different set of constraints and assumptions > when compared to what an agent will be tasked with. > > I would be interested in seeing the cloud-config piece pulled out into > its own library. That syntax is pretty popular, and in fact was mostly > mimicked by the cloudformation tool 'cfn-init'. I suspect that they did > not just do this work in cloud-init because it is GPLv3, or because of the > Canonical CLA.. two things that scare off IP-hungry companies like Amazon. > > _______________________________________________ > OpenStack-dev mailing list > OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev