Event report: Fedora Cloud FAD 2016

Around a month back the Fedora Cloud Working Group met in Raleigh for two days for Cloud FAD. The goal of the meet was to agree about the future we want, to go through major action items for the coming releases. I reached Raleigh one day before, Adam Miller was my room mate for this trip. Managed to meet Spot after a long time, this was my first visit to mothership :) I also managed to meet my new teammate Randy Barlow.

Adam took the lead in the event, we first went through the topics from the FAD wiki page. Then arranged them as in the order we wanted to discuss.

Documentation was the first item. Everyone in the room agreed that it is the most important part of the project, we communicate with our users using the documentation. If a project can provide better documentation with clear examples, it will be able to attract more users to itself. Last year I have started a repo to have documents available in the faster manner, but that did not work out well. Jared volunteered, and also suggested to have an open repo where people can submit documents without worrying much about format. He will help to convert to the right format as required. We also noted few important examples/documents we want to see. Feel free to write about any of these and submit a pull request to the repo.

Automated testing was the next import point. We went through the current state of tests in Autocloud project. Most of our tests there came from various bugs filed against the images/tools. Dusty was very efficient in creating the corresponding issues on github from the RH bugzilla, which then in turn was converted into proper Python3 unittest based test case by the volunteers. Next we moved to the automated testing of layered image builds. Tflink provided valuable input on this discussion. We talked SPC(s), how the maintainers of the images will be responsible for the tests. For the tests related to the Cloud/Atomic images, the Cloud Working Group will be responsible.

There were few super long discussions related Fedora, Atomic, and Openshift projects. Many members from the Openshift development team also joined in the discussion. Results of these discussions will be seen in the mailing lists (a lot of content for this blog post). We also discussed about Vagrant, and related tools people are using or creating. With help from Randy, I managed to package vagrant-digitalocean plugin during the FAD. There will be a Fedora magazine post with more details on the same.

We also agreed upon having monthly updated base images. We still have to find out a few missing points related to the same so that we can have a smooth updated release.

Public cloud provider outreach was one of the last points we discussed. We have to pick different providers one by one, and have to make sure that we can provide updated releases to them for the consumption the users. The point of more documentation came up in this discussion too.