Changes/AtomicHost

Atomic Host

Summary

New Fedora product: Fedora Atomic Host, an implementation of the Project Atomic pattern.

This is a continuation and expansion of Changes/Atomic_Cloud_Image.

See also the following related changes:

• Changes/RpmOstree
• Changes/Docker_Container_Image
• Changes/Kubernetes

Owner

• Name: Cloud SIG / Joe Brockmeier and Colin Walters
• Email: jzb@fedoraproject.org walters@verbum.org
• Release notes owner:
• Product: Atomic Host
• Responsible WG: Cloud

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 22
• Last updated: 2014-11-11
• Tracker bug:

Detailed Description

The original Changes/Atomic_Cloud_Image was a host system delivered just as a cloud image. This Change for Fedora 22 expands it to a multitude of delivery vehicles:

• Bare metal support via Anaconda
• Cloud providers
  • OpenStack/KVM qcow2
  • EC2 AMI
  • Google Compute Engine
• Vagrant boxes (VirtualBox and libvirt/qemu)
• Ultra-minimal PXE-to-Live image designed for PXE booting diskless servers

Benefit to Fedora

Containers are a powerful and flexible way to deploy and manage server applications, with numerous benefits such as density, ease of deployment, and orchestration. The Atomic Host is optimized for running containers, coming out of the box with storage tuned for Docker.

Scope

• Proposal owners: Maintain kickstart and tree configuration, integration with Anaconda and other tools, maintain packages in Fedora
• Other developers: Unknown.
• Release engineering: Will need to generate trees during the general Fedora compose process, and generate install media and cloud image based on trees.
• Policies and guidelines: May need updates for RpmOstree.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Mainline upgrades should operate unchanged.

How To Test

Test installing and running the each of the Atomic variant delivery vehicles.

User Experience

New variant of Fedora, optimized for running containers at scale.

Dependencies

Anaconda, Fedora Base, plus the other components listed here: RpmOstree, Kubernetes, and the Docker containers.

Contingency Plan

• Blocks product? Yes, Atomic Host

If something fails and this product can't ship, some upgrade mechanism for Fedora 21 Atomic Cloud Image users would need to be evaluated. The simplest fallback is to tell those users to reinstall with a traditional Fedora 22 Cloud image.

Documentation

Need to document how to install and manage the Atomic variant.

Release Notes

New Fedora product: Fedora Atomic Host Image, featuring Docker and tools from Project Atomic.

Docker is an easy to use interface for running application containers on Linux. Fedora is uniquely positioned to provide the best platform for Docker, since this container technology is not a security solution, but can be made reasonably secure when wrapped with SELinux. Furthermore, Fedora will provider container image content.