EC2AutomationSpec

Revision 8 as of 2009-06-10 21:15:57

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Summary

This spec describes the automation of the process of building the Ubuntu EC2 images. The current process involves some error prone manual steps.

We want the EC2 image building process to follow that of every other image build in Ubuntu, so we want daily, automated builds, and a very well described process for publishing these to EC2.

Release Note

Ubuntu on EC2 now follows the same release schedule as the rest of Ubuntu.

Rationale

The current process is error prone as it's entirely manual and not very well defined. This makes us look bad and needs to be fixed ASAP.

User stories

  1. Dennis hears that Ubuntu Karmic alpha-3 is out and wants to test it on EC2.
  2. Edward wants to test Ubuntu Karmic beta on his own cloud.

Design

Building the filesystem images should be completely automatic.

The build should result in a set of filesystem images available alongside the ISO's on cdimage.ubuntu.com (or in a similar location). These are useful for local testing (in either straight KVM or in UEC) and for use with private clouds. The release process, which is (and should be) manual, should be extremely well defined (like a recipe with clearly phrased, discrete steps to be taken from the availability of the image until people can start using them on EC2).

Implementation

  1. Get access to build ressources in the DC.
    • RT #34276 filed (said to be implemented Real Soon Now™)
  2. Merge VMBuilder-EC2 with VMBuilder proper.
    • DONE
  3. Once 1 and 2 are done, a cron job needs to be setup to build the various images every day and publish them somewhere.
  4. Define the recipe for publishing releases.

Test/Demo Plan

The Jaunty EC2 release will be the guinea pig (this sounds much worse than it is.. This is a new process, but should in every way be superior to the previous, manual approach). We'll shortly release a beta of the Jaunty images built in the DC and released according to the recipe.

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