A puzzle called oVirt Node Next

Puzzle{width=”640” height=”480”}

oVirt Node Next is like a big puzzle.

In the classic - or vintage - oVirt Node a lot of the build logic, administration, and customizataion tooling was custom built. This was ideal back then when Node was born more than eight years ago (the repository goes back to Nov 19 2007), because a lot of the stuff Node used was just not there.

A few of the nifty things of the past include

  • Blacklisting recipes to minimize the ISO
  • edit-node to customize the ISO
  • The TUI setup to ease administration
  • The TUI installer to install Node
  • …

All of these things were maintained by the core Node team - with occasional contributions from other contributors. This worked well while Node was small. But when Node gained more features, and all available features were used the number of bugs started to rise. In the end a lot of time was spend on just maintaining the current code-base, without room for real steps forward.

Now, eight years after classic Node we are in a situation that existing technology is more advanced and new projects appeared on the dance floor.

In this environment of more advanced technologies and diverse projects we noticed that a lot of the functionality Node provides, is already there. Taking the examples from above …

  • Fedora is working itself to provide a smaller footprint, a side effect of the whole Cloud image movement and lately also because of Atomic
  • The guestfish family is around to help you to modify existing images
  • Cockpit is there to ease host administration
  • And anaconda matured well to provide a nice installation experience

All the functionality we maintained ourselfs for years is now available in other projects. Once we saw the common denominator between all those technologies, it was clear that the next version of Node should combine existing technologies efficiently, rather than to continue to develop and maintain them ourselfs.

And integrating all the different technologies and projects together is like working on a puzzle. It’s more bringing the pieces together to reveal the final image^1{.footnote-ref}^.

::: {.footnotes role=”doc-endnotes”}

  1. ::: {#fn:1} Okay, granted, classic Node was also like a puzzle, but a lot of glue was needed to create the picture. ↩︎{.footnote-backref} ::: :::

::: {#footer} [ December 22nd, 2015 4:48pm ]{#timestamp} [fedora]{.tag} [atomic]{.tag} [ovirt]{.tag} [node]{.tag} [Libguestfs]{.tag} [anaconda]{.tag} :::