Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2021 15:56:17 -0800
From: Mike Crute <mike@crute.us>
To: Romain Lecat <romain.lecat1@gmail.com>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Alpine Linux for other cloud providers
Message-ID: <20210117235617.GA3369494@crute.us>
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On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 03:13:00AM +0100, Romain Lecat wrote:
> Hello Alpine Team,
> 
> Now that you provide an AWS EC2 image of Alpine Linux, since the 
> latest release, I was wondering if you intended to provide other 
> formats for other cloud providers?
> 
> I do work for 3DS Outscale (https://en.outscale.com/), a French IaaS 
> Cloud Provider, as a systems engineer, and I'd be interested to 
> provide an Alpine Linux Image for our customers.
> 
> Most of AWS EC2 images can be used pretty much as-is on our Cloud 
> because we provide EC2 Metadata for CloudInit, so most of CloudInit 
> images do work fine.
>
> Would it be possible to get a raw of a boot drive of an AMI to see if 
> I can make it work on our Cloud?
> 
> Thanks,
> Best regards,
> Romain Lecat

Hello Romain,

We're very interested in supporting as many cloud providers as possible 
with the Alpine images. The images are currently being built with 
Hashicorp Packer using the EC2 driver but you should be able to get them 
working with the QEMU driver (https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/qemu) 
which will give you an importable file in RAW or QCOW2 format.

The code for the official images is here: 
https://github.com/mcrute/alpine-ec2-ami/

The images don't currently use cloud-init but rather tiny-ec2-bootstrap 
(https://github.com/mcrute/tiny-ec2-bootstrap/) which is a very minimal 
re-implementation that supports only SSH keys and userdata scripts. As 
long as your metadata interface supports those in the same way as AWS 
then that should work fine. In the 3.14 release cycle we're planning to 
migrate to official cloud-init.

If you run into any issues getting the image working please file an 
issue on the alpine-ec2-ami GitHub repo and we'll be happy to help you 
troubleshoot any issues.

It looks like 3DS Outscale supports public images (based on the API 
docs). Once the images are working would you be interested in listing 
them on the Alpine Cloud Images page and making them part of our 
official build and release process?

~mike