Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 19:04:52 -0800
From: Mike Crute <mike@crute.us>
To: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org, tomalok@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [3.14] Release process change proposal: Add official Alpine
 Linux cloud images
Message-ID: <20201215030452.GA359703@crute.us>
References: <134020455.7nPEQRCJ1u@nanabozho>
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On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 02:29:08AM +0000, Ariadne Conill 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.
> 
> 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

Hi Ariadne,

I started the community images that you are referring to and am one of 
the maintainers of them. I completely support pulling these into the 
upstream Alpine project and treating them as official release. I would 
be happy to assist in doing that and, with my co-maintainers, continuing 
to maintain and release them as part of the Cloud team going forward.

The current images all reside in an AWS account dedicated to only the 
hosting and production of those images. Migrating it to Alpine should be 
trivial, and current users would not be required to change their 
orchestration scripts to continue using the official images.

There's a little bit of private infrastructure that facilitates secure 
credential management that would need to be open sourced and transferred 
to the Alpine Infrastructure team but that too should be pretty 
straightforward. That infrastructure will need to grow a bit to support 
multi-cloud use-cases in the future.

We've been primarily focused on stability and feature completeness for 
AWS at this point and I think we're on good footing there. I'd recommend 
releasing those images as official as soon as reasonably possible, then 
we can start to investigate the work that would be required to begin 
adding support for other clouds. This would also put us into a good 
position to advertise the images on the AWS marketplace as official 
Alpine images and to make the case for the removal of the existing, 
predatory, images.

I've opened issues in our GitHub project [0] to begin research on the 
other items you've mentioned.

[0] https://github.com/mcrute/alpine-ec2-ami/issues

~mike