As we get closer to putting disposable clients into production, we need a way to have updated images for those clients. I don't think this is news to anyone since the topic has come up several times before but now there's a bit more urgency :)
In my mind, we have the following requirements: - Produces qcow2 images that work with testcloud - can be run in an automated way - allows adding/changing/customizing packages contained in image - allows arbitrary repos to be specified and the following "nice to have" things: - can build branched and rawhide images - builds images from scratch using only things provided by releng - written in python - builds more than qcow2 for some future-proofing - can run well in a VM Is there anything that I missed? As far as I know, we're looking at two options right now: taskotron-vmbuilder and imagefactory. I've put together a list of the pros and cons that I know of for both tools. Thoughts on which direction to take would be appreciated. Tim taskotron-vmbuilder [1] is a PoC system kparal built around virt-builder [2]. Images are specified in a yaml file and instead of building those images from scratch "It takes cleanly prepared, digitally signed OS templates and customizes them". [1] https://bitbucket.org/fedoraqa/taskotron-vmbuilder [2] http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html pros: - already does almost everything we need - fits all requirements - builds quickly - well supported cons: - requires blobs which are out of our control * yes, I know who does the work behind virt-builder. My concern isn't with him, it's the general concept that I don't like. This also gets into the fact that we would have pretty much no control over timing of release for the base images. - limited support for rawhide and branched releases - limited support for non-server spins - output images are large in size - virt-builder is not written in python imagefactory [3] is a system for building os images and potentially shipping those images to various cloud systems. Images are specified with a kickstart file and an xml template descriptor. Imagefactory builds images from scratch, essentially using the kickstart to run an install inside a VM and processing that install into the desired image type. [3] http://imgfac.org/ pros: - used by releng to create Fedora cloud images - builds images from packages: no blobs that we don't have control over - already has a mostly-complete RESTful api that can list images and trigger new builds - can support almost all spins; anything that can be represented in a kickstart - written in python cons: - not as fast as virt-builder - somewhat more complex than virt-builder - when something goes wrong, debugging can be difficult due to how the tool works - we may be somewhat on our own to fix issues if releng is not hitting similar problems - may not run well in a VM (would need nested virt)
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