cloud-init: Summit 2019#

Note

This article was written by Joshua Powers and originally published on 21 October 2019. It is shared here under license with no changes.

Seattle market

Last month the cloud-init development team from Canonical ran our third annual two-day summit. Attendees included cloud developers from Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, as well as the maintainers of cloud-init from Amazon Linux, SUSE, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

The purpose of this two-day event is to meet with contributors, demo recent developments, present future plans, resolve outstanding issues, and collect additional feedback on the past year.

Like last year, the even was held in Seattle, Washington. A special thanks goes to Amazon for providing breakfast and lunch while hosting us!

Topics and Decisions#

Here are summary of some of the topics discussed during the sprint:

  • New Security Process: I proposed a process by which security issues would be reported to the project, how they would be evaluated, fixed, and eventually disclosed. While this is not fully complete, the process has already been used once to evaluate what turned out to be non-security issues.

  • Boot Performance: Ryan started the second day off talking about the boot performance analysis that he is conducted. He has proposed an initial branch with changes to help many clouds improve their time to SSH. While this work will involve effort across platforms, kernels, distros, and cloud-init, we can already start to make changes to cloud-init.

  • GitHub Transition: We are moving the project to GitHub in an effort to continue to gather contributions and improve our merge proposal process. We have some early testing and CI branches ready to go. We are waiting on some open questions around the CLA and mirroring back to Launchpad to continue the move.

  • Python Support: The last release of cloud-init in 2019 is the final version to support python 2.7. We will cut a branch for future bug fixes. After that master will now support Python 3.4 going forward. A future discussion around how to move the Python 3 version is needed. See the mailing list post for more details.

  • Red Hat Support: Edwardo gave a presentation on Red Hat’s process around cloud-init. He showed the versions they are on and what they do when a new release comes out.

Working Sessions#

During the summit, we took time to have merge review and bug squashing time. During this time, attendees came with outstanding bugs to discuss possible fixes as well as go through outstanding merge requests and get live reviews.

Another talk

Thank you#

As always a huge thank you to the community for attending! The summit was a great time to see many contributors face-to-face as well as collect feedback for cloud-init development.

Notes of both days can be found on the cloud-init mailing list. There you will find additional details about what I have described above and much more.

Finally, if you are interested in following or getting involved in cloud-init development check out #cloud-init on Freenode or subscribe to the cloud-init mailing list.