References: <1820c942-7444-8bb1-60f5-f6b5e9e9f8e6@wildtechgarden.ca>
User-agent: mu4e 1.7.26; emacs 28.1
From: Nico Schottelius <nico.schottelius@ungleich.ch>
To: "Daniel F. Dickinson" <dfdpublic@wildtechgarden.ca>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Lightening my cloud automation via tiny-cloud
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2022 10:30:15 +0200
In-reply-to: <1820c942-7444-8bb1-60f5-f6b5e9e9f8e6@wildtechgarden.ca>
Message-ID: <877d4uy4mp.fsf@ungleich.ch>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Hey Daniel,


"Daniel F. Dickinson" <dfdpublic@wildtechgarden.ca> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> TL;DR I'm starting an 'experiment' with 'less is more' automation via
> tiny-cloud and **no** Packer or Terraform, and no cloud-init, python
> (and therefore Ansible), et al on the client side, and would appreciate
> any development advice in so doing. [...]

as a cloud provider I can only say I really support such
developments. Building a VM is often not much more than x-bootstrap into
a directory that is residing on a loopback mounted disk. As a matter of
fact, we build many of our VM images like this [0].

However our scripts are hardcoded for a specific OS and for use with
opennebula, so they are not universal.

What I'd recommend is actually using python for such a project, as it is
"nearby shell" and easy enough, but this is just my personal opinion.

Regarding the metadata "server": there are 2 ways currently of using it:
a) via an disk / iso image b) via networking. (b) is usually error prone
as many tools rely on having IPv4, which does not exist for instance in
our core network.

Again, writing that daemon is probably not a big thing, but the choice
of network vs. disk might make be smart to consider before.

That said, in case you are a Matrix user, we discuss similar topics in
the #hacking-and-learning:ungleich.ch room from time to time.

If you need at some point in the future a cloud provider crazy enough to
support your project in regards of supporting the whole flow, give me a
ping.

Best regards,

Nico


[0] https://code.ungleich.ch/ungleich-public/ungleich-tools/src/branch/master/opennebula-images


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