[one-dev] New repository for context packages

[Javier Fontan]

Hi

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 8:15 PM, Boris Parak <256254 at mail.muni.cz> wrote:
>> It makes total sense and I would love to just rely in cloud-init. The
>> problem is that I had no luck making it work in all distributions, for
>> example Ubuntu 12.04.
>
> Was it the network configuration issue you are mentioning below or
> something else?

Yes, the problem is the network.

>> [..]
>> Another problem is adding new features to it as it may take time to
>> put them in the upstream repo. This may be fixed having a special
>
> I would go with the second option. Advanced configuration shouldn't be
> handled by could-init directly anyway. That's where chef or puppet
> come in. Network, basic access (ssh keys, user accounts), maybe some
> dynamic mounts or packages installed from repos ... that's as far as I
> would go with cloud-init. Configuring complex applications without
> provisioning/orchestration is not a good idea.

I think it would be nice to have the same semantics in both. For
example the execute scripts from the context functionality. It can
also be done using the USER_DATA feature of cloud-init but it would be
better to do the same using FILES_DS and INIT_SCRIPTS.

>> If there's a way to make it work reliabily without dhcp and there's a
>> nice way to add new features without changing cloud-init I will push
>> for it and deprecate the context packages.
>
> Is static network configuration really that popular? I had no idea ...
> Ok, I will do what I can to find a solution. As for the second part,
> do you have an example of such a feature?

Yes, there are a lot of people that uses static network configuration:

* The dhcp server needs to be in the same networks which is serving.
With many private and dynamic networks this is cumbersome.
* In some datacenters the use of dhcp is strictly forbidden. We had
this problem in some companies.
* This many not be a real reason but having one less daemon makes the
system easier to deploy.

I've been working on the cloud-init scripts this weekend (mainly
testing with CentOS 7) to make the network configuration compatible
with "ip" and the new interface names but it's still having problems.
I may have to ask for help with that.

As for examples for features that we could add I cannot think of
anything now. It's usually a feature added to OpenNebula that needs
some action in the guest system. I suppose all can be done with
scripts added to the context CD and executed by cloud-init.

Cheers

-- 
Javier Fontán Muiños
Developer
OpenNebula - Flexible Enterprise Cloud Made Simple
www.OpenNebula.org | @OpenNebula | github.com/jfontan