From: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
To: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [3.14] Release process change proposal: Add official Alpine Linux cloud images
Message-ID: <1709610.Hnary3G1YW@nanabozho>
In-Reply-To: <20201215082609.552731cf@ncopa-desktop.lan>
References: <134020455.7nPEQRCJ1u@nanabozho> <20201215082609.552731cf@ncopa-desktop.lan>
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Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:17:06 GMT

On Tuesday, December 15, 2020 12:26:09 AM MST Natanael Copa wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Dec 2020 02:29:08 GMT
> 
> Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> Yes. But lets get 3.13 out first?

Right, hince why I propose it for 3.14.  It is good to start planning 
initiatives like this early, so that we determine resource requirements and 
fulfill them ahead of time.

> 
> ...
> 
> > ## 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.
> I'd like to have linode on the list early too.

Would linode actually use our image?  My understanding is that linode prefer 
to master their own images.

> I think it would be great if we could have alpine based images for CI
> systems, like github actions:
> 
> ```
> jobs:
>   build:
>     name: Build
>     runs-on: alpine-latest
>     ...
> ```
> 
> I suppose having cloud images is the first step.

GitHub actions already support Alpine (and any other image that is delivered 
by Docker), but it is kind of weird in how it works.  See ifupdown-ng GitHub 
actions for details there.

> > ## 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.
> 
> I suspect we may need more people on the infra team for that.

Some of the people who have been working on the community AMI effort would 
likely be interested in volunteering there.

> > ## 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.
> 
> We may need to get more disk space for this on our master mirror.

In general, the storage for the images are provided by the cloud providers, as 
you upload the mastered images to each cloud provider as an AMI or whatever.  
Thus storing those cloud images would not require us to store anything new on 
our mirrors.

Ariadne