Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:30:34 -0800
From: Mike Crute <mike@crute.us>
To: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
Cc: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>,
	~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [3.14] Release process change proposal: Add official Alpine
 Linux cloud images
Message-ID: <20201215163034.GA1500235@crute.us>
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On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 09:17:06AM +0000, Ariadne Conill wrote:
> 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:
>>
>> 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.

Having Linode available would be nice. At a quick glance I don't see 
anything in their API that supports custom images, though I recall there 
was some roundabout way to upload them for a single account several 
years ago. We may need to talk to a human on their side to make that 
happen, if anyone has contacts over there. Once we migrate to GitLab I'll 
throw together issues for each cloud provider we want to support and we 
can use that as a jumping off point for research and prioritization of 
support.

>> I think it would be great if we could have alpine based images for CI 
>> systems, like github actions:
>>
>> 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.

I thought most CI systems were docker based these days. I guess we could 
look into this going forward. I would recommend not making this a 
blocker for a 3.14 release of the images though since there's a lot more 
surface area to cover in the CI space and a limited number of hands to 
cover it.

>> 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.

I'd be happy to join the infra team as well to make this happen. I'm 
already personally hosting all of the AWS AMI infra as it stands so I'm 
pretty familiar with the space.

>> > ## 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.

That's correct, at least until we get to Qemu images (which are on my 
wish list). But the cloud providers proper have their own storage. This 
does come with some fractional USD cost but currently it's under $5/mo 
for the global AWS image set.

~mike