From: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: [3.14] Release process change proposal: Add official Alpine Linux cloud images
Message-ID: <134020455.7nPEQRCJ1u@nanabozho>
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Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 02:29:08 GMT

Hello,

I believe it is time (beyond time, really) for us to start mastering official 
Alpine cloud images as part of the release process.  This is something that 
other distributions comparable to us have been doing for some time.

Additionally, due to the vacuum of official cloud images, there has been a few 
people offering custom Alpine images on AWS at prices that any reasonable 
person would consider predatory [1].  Multiple people have been lead at first 
glance to believe these activities were somehow connected to the project, 
which is also a problem [2].

This lead to community members banding together to create unofficial community 
AMIs for using Alpine on EC2 that are offered gratis [3], but those efforts have 
not had the official backing of the project, which continues to enable the 
predatory vendors to unjustly profit from our project and its reputation.

## Benefits to Alpine

Adopting the Alpine Linux EC2 images (and adjusting them to use cloud-init 
[4]) would give users a clear path to an Alpine image on the cloud provider of 
their choice, at least AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Oracle would be targeted 
to begin with.  With a clear path to an officially supported image, predatory 
vendors would find it more difficult to continue misusing the Alpine name and 
reputation to sell their custom images and pass them off as official.

## Organizational Plan

These images would be maintained by a new Cloud team which would coordinate 
the image mastering process, as well as all packages relating to using, 
creating and publishing the images.

They would participate in the release management process, ensuring that Alpine 
images are generated and published automatically by the build servers when a 
release is generated.

## Support Requirements from Alpine Infrastructure Team

The resources relating to the the community AMI image effort would be 
transferred to the Infrastructure team.  This primarily consists of a small 
application that acts as a credential broker.

Storage for the images would also become managed by the infrastructure team, 
but most likely we could get the costs of doing so offset as other 
distributions have.

A GitLab team would be created for the Cloud team so that they may own 
packages and Git repositories in the Alpine project.

Ariadne

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B07Q4Q8KV5 is offered at a starting 
rate of $0.50/hour or $2500 per year, is outdated and has several CVEs in the 
image.  No support or refunds are offered for this image.

[2]: The latest example being https://twitter.com/mistersql/status/
1337907929832452099

[3]: https://github.com/mcrute/alpine-ec2-ami/tree/master/releases

[4]: cloud-init was recently brought to Alpine by Dermot Bradley (minimal in 
IRC) largely for this purpose.