Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:26:09 +0100
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [3.14] Release process change proposal: Add official Alpine
 Linux cloud images
Message-ID: <20201215082609.552731cf@ncopa-desktop.lan>
In-Reply-To: <134020455.7nPEQRCJ1u@nanabozho>
References: <134020455.7nPEQRCJ1u@nanabozho>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

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?

... 

> ## 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.

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.

> ## 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. 

> ## 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.

> 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.
>