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

What cloud software are already available in Debian

There's three big cloud computing suites that are available in Debian: OpenStack, XCP (Xen Cloud Platform), and OpenNebula. They all work pretty well in Debian 7 "Wheezy".

See each page for more details :

Building Debian cloud images

If you use OpenStack, or anything which can accommodate a raw or qcow2 image, you can use the openstack-debian-images package to build your images.

Testing Debian Cloud Images (for Debian Cloud Image 'certification')

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 not bound to a specific package maintained in the team (for example, for the Amazon AWS images).

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

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:

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