Debian Cloud Sprint 2018 – Bits from Debian

The Debian Cloud team held a
sprint for the third time,
hosted by Amazon at its Seattle offices from October 8th to October 10th, 2018.

We discussed the status of images on various platforms, especially in
light of moving to FAI as the only method for building
images on all the cloud platforms. The next topic was building and testing workflows,
including the use of Debian machines for building, testing, storing, and publishing built
images. This was partially caused by the move of all
repositories to Salsa, which allows for better
management of code changes, especially reviewing new code.

Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub
and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and
required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86
images, and FAI can now build such images.

Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to
the debian-cloud mailing list).
We also discussed providing many image variants, which
requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding
testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software
like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using
secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to
provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

Another topic of discussion was the management of accounts used by Debian to
build and publish Debian images. SPI will create and manage
such accounts for Debian, including user accounts (synchronised
with Debian accounts). Buster images should be published using those
new accounts. Our Cloud Team delegation proposal (prepared by Luca
Fillipozzi) was accepted
by the Debian Project Leader.
Sprint minutes are available,
including a summary and a list of action items for individual members.