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Rad Web Hosting

@abcdw @incognet Out of curiosity, what virtualization/hypervisor/deployment interface are you needing pre-built images for?

11 comments
Andrew Tropin

@radwebhosting @incognet We work with a project, which needs provider-agnostic deployement. For now we decided to go this way: create debian VPS, infect it with guix (transform it into Guix System), do snapshot and spin up other VPS from this snapshot and use guix deploy via ssh to deploy locally-defined and locally build OS to that host.

However, it would be cool to have an ability to spin up bare bone Guix System with specified set of ssh keys from VPS provider's UI/API directly.

Andrew Tropin

@radwebhosting @incognet To achieve this we thoughts about implementing cloud-init API and building guix system image with a cloud-init service inside, so ssh keys can be obtained on first boot, network is set apropriately, root fs is resized to fit the underlying storage.

Something like that:
github.com/ipdb/bigchaindb-gui

We are looking for VPS providers, who will be willing to cooperate on providing such cloud-ready guix system image out of the box.

@radwebhosting @incognet To achieve this we thoughts about implementing cloud-init API and building guix system image with a cloud-init service inside, so ssh keys can be obtained on first boot, network is set apropriately, root fs is resized to fit the underlying storage.

Something like that:
github.com/ipdb/bigchaindb-gui

Rad Web Hosting

@abcdw @incognet Instead of cloud-init, what if a shell/bash script ran on initial boot to place public keys, resize fs, etc? Also, a custom image could be utilized add these changes during initial provisioning most likely. The custom image could be assigned to the account for reuse on-demand…

You might contact us if this could be helpful in your use-case. radvps.com

Andrew Tropin

@radwebhosting @incognet Yep, shell script can also work. The nice thing about cloud-init is that if implemented you get AWS, DO and many other providers "for free".

Ok, thank you for the info!

Rad Web Hosting

@abcdw I'm not sure about free AWS or DO, but I just created a deployable Guix template (bare-bones; from the default qcow2) and noticed its over 30GB uncompressed, which is probably why many providers wouldn't support deployable images.

If you have a configuration you'd like to share or a set of commands you perform to achieve your custom configuration, please share them and I'll try to build it, then package it for deployment to ensure automatic setup is not flawed.

Andrew Tropin

@radwebhosting AFAIK AWS, GCP, DO and many other providers use cloud-init for setting up fresh VMs.

git clone git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.
cd guix
IMAGE=$(guix system image --image-type=qcow2 gnu/system/examples/bare-bones.tmpl)
qemu-img info $IMAGE

virtual size: 1.82 GiB (1949847552 bytes)
disk size: 509 MiB

Andrew Tropin

@radwebhosting Probably the official guix qcow image is built with --image-size=30G option or something like that.

Rad Web Hosting replied to Andrew

@abcdw Crazy! It’s the qcow2 image hosted on their public sftp mirrors…you’d guess they’d want to minimize it, but I won’t pretend to be any kind of Guix expert!

Would you like to access a test account on our system to see how it could be managed for successive deployments/updates/etc?

Andrew Tropin replied to Rad Web Hosting

@radwebhosting The real size is still < 1.5G, it's just a virtual size, which is huge.

I'm quite limited on time for the next couple weeks, but if you interested to provide Guix OS template for your servers, I would be glad to cooperate on this. (To be clear: I can deploy Guix on servers of almost any provider, I'm interested in first-class support, so other people from the community can get it spinned up in seconds with zero additional steps).

Rad Web Hosting replied to Andrew

@abcdw We’d be happy to support you in setting up the optimal service provisioning interface to best manage your client onboarding projects.

We have provided similar custom services to other clients and while we don’t provide support directly to your end-users, we’ll help diagnose and resolve any issues you report, originating anywhere within the supply chain.

We’ll be available to help you whether you need it now, in three weeks, or in 6 months…just reference our thread 😃✅

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