Pushing Ubuntu to the Cloud

Registered by Ben Howard

With the proliferation of new clouds vendors, there is substantial risk of inconsistent user experience on different clouds. Trusting vendors to pull images may not be a reliable assumption. For example, vendors may not see the value in publishing a new release day, refreshed cloud images, and/or a standard user experience assumes that cloud vendors will pull the images.

I propose that owing and controlling the publishing of the cloud images provides substantial value to both customers and partners. Leaving vendors or the community to handle populating images on the "greater Cloud" could result in Amazon being the gold standard for the customer experience, with lesser, incomplete or missing experiences on other cloud vendors.

If we choose to maintain official ownership over our images on major vendors, we either need to build a publishing systems, provide pull scripts that our partners will run, provide a public glance server or some combination.

This meeting it to discuss the strategy and come up with a basic plan of action.

Blueprint information

Status:
Not started
Approver:
Antonio Rosales
Priority:
Medium
Drafter:
None
Direction:
Approved
Assignee:
None
Definition:
Approved
Series goal:
Accepted for precise
Implementation:
Deferred
Milestone target:
milestone icon ubuntu-12.04-beta-1

Related branches

Sprints

Whiteboard

Work Items:
[utlemming] Stand-up a public glance server: POSTPONED
[utlemming] Write new Query format in JSON: INPROGRESS
[utlemming] Alter build scripts to publish to glance server: DONE
[utlemming] Write "ubuntu-cloud-images-sync" script: DONE
[utlemming] Document how to consume public glance server: POSTPONED
[utlemming] Modify Ubuntu openstack packaging to include Ubuntu glance server: POSTPONED
[heckj] Change Dashboard to support multiple glance registry servers: TODO
[heckj] Add GPG support for image authenticity: TODO
[smoser] cloud-init should look for archive.local and support apt-proxy: TODO
[utlemming] Eucalytpus sync script: POSTPONED
[utlemming] Upstream changes to live-build: POSTPONED
[utlemming] Stand-up a public glance server: POSTPONED

Rationale: There is significant value to both the community and paid customers in having Canonical own and maintaining images on major cloud-vendors.

Assumptions:
  * There are literally thousands of public Ubuntu public images; each public image is slightly different and is confusing to customers.
  * Owning our own images will help to reduce vendor customization and make for a consistent experience across different cloud-vendors.
  * There will be new major cloud-vendors that will want the official images, or on which we want to publish images.
  * The current system was design for publishing images to one vendors in multiple regions
  * Amazon AWS is growing with new services and new regions, which may stress the current system

UDS Deciusions:
To provide multiple ways for different cloud vendors to consume the official Ubuntu images. The four methods decided on are:
1. Push Ubuntu images to all EC2 regions
2. Provide a public glance server for OpenStack Deployments. OpenStack to make changes to support multiple glance registry servers.
3. Provide a sync script for people to pull the latest images for OpenStack
4. Provide a sync script for people to pull the latest images for Eucalpytus
To

(?)

Work Items

Dependency tree

* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.