Growing Ubuntu's cloud community

[Stephan Hermann]

Hi Scott, all

On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 15:01:56 -0400
Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, September 08, 2010 09:44:44 am Ahmed Kamal wrote:
> >   Hi folks,
> > 
> > For the 11.04 cycle, I will be focusing on growing the community
> > around Ubuntu's cloud offerings (and by extension Ubuntu server).
> > Please reply back with what you consider to be the most important
> > areas that need work to achieve such a target
> > In particular I think we should try to answer questions like
> >   * Where do we see new contributers adding value to Ubuntu's cloud
> > offerings ? What can they do
> >   * How to make it easier for new contributers to jump-in and have
> > an easy start
> > 
> > Awaiting your suggestions and past experiences.
> > Thanks
> 
> Personally I've found all this emphasis on cloud instead of
> traditional server applications (many of which are used in the cloud)
> to be quite demotivating. I spend considerably less time on server
> related development than I used to.

This is also my observation. 

As discussed with many server people during UDS-M I raised this issue
too.

As I was attending UDS-M as company user, and not as "community
member", I was very sad about this.

Every session was "renamed" with the "cloud" suffix.

For us as a company, ubuntu server is our foundation for our product.
It's necessary that we focus on bare metal and virtualisation solutions.

As we are not using any cloud services from Rackspace or Amazon for
Ubuntu Servers, it's quite important for us, that the focus on real
server hardware is not dropped.

Furthermore, and now speaking as a community server member, I'm not
able to "test" ubuntu server inside the cloud, or test the ubuntu cloud
server installations.

So, if Canonical wants to raise awareness for the cloud, please give us
a possibility to play with the cloud (amazon or whatever).

But as a commercial vendor of internet services which are running under
Ubuntu server, we should focus on "Server" in general, and not "the
cloud".

The only difference between bare metal servers and cloud instances are
the deployment options. I'm using different ways of deploying ubuntu
server on bare metals and e.g. VMWare instances, mostly it's a fully
automated way of provisioning and deploying.

Another point, there is no way (right now) to have a fully functional
asset management for Ubuntu servers or servers in general (servers here
means bare metals and cloud instances).

We should focus on the standard ways of datacenter work, and not only
on special cloud stuff.

My 2€ Cent :)

regards,

\sh