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The CentOS Cloud Instance SIG Proposal

The CentOS Cloud Instance SIG (CCIS) is proposing a group of people coming together to focus on defining and creating CentOS cloud images to be consumed either on or off premise or by third party vendor ecosystems. We are a non vendor, non technology and non agent specific focus group (but we will gladly work with and build content to suite a specific niche or vendor ecosystem).

The CCIS intends to take ownership of existing CentOS Project relationships with vendors, and help curate cloud instances pushed into their market places and official repositories and to become the canonical upstream for all CentOS Linux presence in various virtualised environments.

We want to consider the SIG being renamed from Cloud Instance SIG to Cloud Image SIG since the primary deliverable is CentOS Linux Images.

1. Deliverable

The CCIS will aim to deliver a baseline spec for what a CentOS Linux image should look like, how it behaves, what content it should contain and policies around that specification. We will also aim to define and then deliver a spec that covers testing of these images.

Additionally, we will entertain, advise on and help execute requirements thrown up from niche specific, ecosystem specific or vendor specific conditions.

Finally, we will curate a set of instance metadata, in either kickstart or config file format, or any other appropriate format as required from time to time, to support the CentOS Core SIG's effort in building and delivering the images. We will also co-ordinate and work with the CentOS Infra Team on management around the cloud.centos.org network of machines.

We will also attempt to maintain user grade documentation around the technologies we curate, along with represent the CCIS at CentOS Dojos and related events in community and vendor neutral events with the aim of promoting CentOS Linux as a Cloud Instance platform.

We will only work with opensource, redistribute-able software. However some of the code we want to build and ship might not be mainline accepted as yet, and would be clearly indicated as such. Should we require exclusions to this, we will approach the board and seek legal clearence before importing any code into the centos.org ecosystem.

2. Interface With Other SIGs

We anticipate working with the Core SIG to sync over CentOS Linux releases, and also to ensure the code we ship is tested, maintained and managed properly. We also expect to work closely with the Cloud SIG and other platform SIGs around their use of hypervisor technologies.

Overall we hope to run an inclusive policy allowing other SIG's to incorporate and build upon the resources we maintain.

3. Mechanism To Deliver Software

We will ship CentOS Linux cloud and virtualised instances via cloud.centos.org building upon, taking over and extending the efforts in that space already done in the past, working with all CentOS Versions that still get updates.

The CCIS will aim to run one or more code specific repository in development, testing and production roles. As and when there is a need to, we will interface with the other SIGs to make sure they are able to consume content provided in these repositories or contribute directly into their repositories.

Should there be a need to isolate technology or ecosystem specific content, we may chose to do so either via dedicated repositories or via specific cloud instances.

4. Who Is Involved With The Bootstrap

We will share tasks and create an inclusive environment that allows anyone from the community to join and contribute. The group might also use a common public task tracking tool to coordinate efforts.

5. Software Going Into Bootstrap

We would like to import metadata and instance management code initially based on cloud-init; we might need to incorporate further tooling and admin code.

6. Future Potential Collaborators

The Cloud ecosystem is broad and expanding and we would like to welcome representation from vendor run ecosystems, on premise as well as hosted / development communities.

7. Why This SIG Is Important

Its important that the CentOS Project is able to bring in a group of people who understand the on premise and public cloud ecosystem well, in order to deliver images that are in line with best practises for the CentOS userbase to consume. The lack of established, verifiable official images in various cloud environments has been a limiting factor in widespread CentOS Linux adoption in those areas.

8. Resources Needed

We expect the following from the CentOS Project:

In addition to this list, we might also need other resources from time to time in order to execute on the CCIS mandate; as and when the requirements come up, we will push them up to the CentOS Board for approval.

From time to time we might need to solicit independant sponsorship from third party vendors and projects to further the CCIS interests and mandate.

9. Current Status

CentOS Project is already well represented in various cloud environments, we would want to establish relationships with those entities and make it easier for users to consume CentOS Linux in these areas.

10. Bootstrap Process

We would like to import cloud-init code into a git repository managed at git.centos.org and use that as base to build cloud instances that initially target:

In the first meeting we hope to establish a regular meeting schedule to hold public, inclusive reviews and work on deliverables.

2023-09-11 07:23