Re: [orchestration] AWS public cloud images

[Thompson, David]

Hi Mark,

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 4:18 PM, Mark Meyer <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
> I've the beginning of Guix cloud images available over at Github at
>
>   https://github.com/ofosos/guix-packer/
>
> There's a small writeup of what has been done and what's still missing over 
> here:
>
>   https://ofosos.org/2018/03/26/guix-images-01/
>
> All in all, I split the heavy lifting between Packer (AWS API calls) and 
> `guix system` and that worked remarkably well. There's some integration with 
> EC2 (You can inject a pubkey into the image via the console), but there's 
> also a lot of stuff missing. In the end, I would like to provide public cloud 
> images in some weeks time. Of course you'll have all the tools to rebuild 
> your own images (surprisingly simple).
>
> I think there's still a lot of polish we can apply, but at some point we'll 
> need some help from AWS. I do have AWS support access at work, but am not 
> really comfortable to use company resources for this yet, but I'll probably 
> ask if there's some  avenue to get some 'official' help as a free software 
> project, when I run across our technical account manager.

First of all: Thanks! This is a great start! I've wanted to run GuixSD
EC2 instances for some time but haven't gotten around to it. The more
I think about it, though, the more I wonder how useful an official
GuixSD image is vs. providing software to create AMIs for any given
system configuration. The use-case I'm particularly interested in is
using GuixSD instances in auto scaling groups.  I'm wondering if
there's any other way to create GuixSD AMIs than starting from some
official image, updating Guix, running 'guix system reconfigure', and
using the result as the basis for the AMI. While this ought to work,
it feels very imperative and hacky.  In the future it would also be
great to eliminate the need for Packer entirely and replace it with
Guile.

Anyway, just some food for thought.  Awesome work!

- Dave