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 * [[http://windowsazure.com/|Windows Azure]] cloud platform
  * [[Cloud/WindowsAzureImage]] Using and creating Debian Images on Windows Azure

Cloud Computing with Debian and its descendants

This page summarises on what to expect from Debian when it comes to compute clouds. Please refer to Wikipedia or other sources for details about what clouds are about. The idea is that you get virtual instances of some self-assembled or off-shelf booting disk image. You start them, pay for their lifetime (likely), pay for the data that goes in or out, and stop them again.

Our fine distribution can play any role in here. It can

  • run as a cloud OS
  • run the infrastructure that runs the clouds
  • run as the joe the plumber's regular desktop OS that contacts the cloud infrastructure with requests to control the clouds

What cloud software are already available in Debian

There's 2 big cloud computing suites that are available in Debian: OpenStack and XCP (Xen Cloud Platform). None of them are available in Debian Stable (Squeeze, at the time of writing), but they work pretty well in SID/Wheezy.

See each page for more details :

How to contribute

Join the Debian Cloud team or the mailing lists:

Grab the sources in the /git/openstack or /git/pkg-xen on Alioth.

Note that, especially OpenStack, is BIG. We already have more than 50 binary packages of it in SID. So of course, we'd be more than happy to have help for its packaging/testing.

Reporting bugs

The Debian Cloud team uses the cloud.debian.org pseudo-package to track issues.

After reporting a bug against a Debian package, which has an impact on Debian images provided on or for clouds, please mark that the bug affects cloud.debian.org.

Bugs are divided in four categories, by usertagging with the address cloud.debian.org@packages.debian.org: image (Machine Images), infrastructure, documentation and package.

Bugs related to the images distributed in public clouds (outdatedness, lack of availability in all zones, etc.) can be usertagged aws (Amazon Web Services) or azure (Microsoft Azure). More names of public clouds can of course be added, please keep the list of control commands below up to date.

The user categories were set up with the following control emails: 20121123012638.GA17190@falafel.plessy.net and 20121123015033.GA3022@falafel.plessy.net.

Where to get more information

  • Eucalyptus - a free cloud infrastructure with Debian packages pending

    • euca2ools - free clone of Amazon EC2 console tools

    • ?Cloud/CreateEucalyptusImage - instruction on how to prepare a cloud-ready image

    • Cloud/TorqueCluster - instruction how to setup a torque cluster within a Eucalyptus cloud

    • ?Cloud/Integration - changes or additions to Debian to prepare and run images using only packaged material.

  • OpenNebula - toolkit for IaaS cloud handling (with mixed private and public nodes)

  • Amazon - the EC2 that got the craze going

  • The Net At Large - various howtos that linking Debian with clouds
    • LinuxConfig.org - how to prepare an image for Amazon's EC2 (see also Cloud/CreateEC2Image)

  • Windows Azure cloud platform

    • ?Cloud/WindowsAzureImage Using and creating Debian Images on Windows Azure

Who in the Debian community is interested in clouds and why?

Firstly, the extension from providing packages together is to use them together. Thus, the clouds, just like computational grids, may become a way to extend our current way we think about our community. The following groups were observed to show some sincere interest in the cloud technology:

  • DebianMed

    • sharing of administrative burden also for data that needs to be regularly updated
    • its Bioinformatics wing sees lots of parallel computing to be performed on clouds
    • maintains the DebianPureBlends metapackage med-cloud, which can be the base of a Debian bioinformatics machine image.

The RightScale OSS team builds and publishes images for cloud users. For a list of available images, see Cloud/AmazonEC2Image.

FAQ

What is the default login name on the Debian AMIs ?

The default user name is admin. There is no password: log in with SSH and a key pair. It is a privileged account: run sudo -i to become root.

See also