Promoting Lucid Testing using KVM

[Rick Spencer]

On Mon, 2009-11-09 at 07:40 -0600, Dustin Kirkland wrote:

> I agree that testing in the cloud would be interesting.  But does this
> obviate enabling users to test on their local hypervisor too?
> 
No, this is an *and* not an *or*. One key advantage of testing in the
cloud is the ability to get rapid feedback from non-technical stake
holders who are not able to run the current development version. While a
local VM would be helpful, being able to log into a remote instance and
get "instant" gratification would be strong.

As I say, getting to the daily in the cloud is additive, note a couple
more draw back of testing in the cloud:
> 
> I see three drawbacks with running a desktop image in the cloud:
>  1) cost -- users would need to pay real money to do this
[Not if it's for internal users running from our private clous]
>  2) performance -- VNC over the WAN can be painful
>  3) experience -- to run in EC2, we're going to need to bundle an
> image, which will be similar, but not identical to the LiveCD ISO
> experience
4) No ability to test hardware compatibility
5) No compositing (I am assuming) so harder to test for important "look
and feel" issues.

Cheers, Rick