 Hey there and welcome to the Fedora podcast episode 27. I'm Eric the IT guy Hendricks and today We are going to be interviewing a couple of folks from the Fedora community talking about the Fedora cloud edition We'll talk about what is a an edition of Fedora. We'll talk about what? What goes into one and specifically what is Fedora cloud, but Admittedly, I learned quite a bit getting prepared for this episode. I Had I will admit live on air that I actually had some misconceptions about what Fedora cloud edition was So to help me dive into that topic. I want to bring back my co-host from a few episodes ago Mr. Joseph. Yeah, guy. Oh, so did I get it? Yes, you got it. Hey, yeah, all right. Cool. I'm done. I'm out and Also joining us today is mr. Major Hayden himself So Joseph, let's start with you. Why don't you just quick introduction tells what you do for a living and What do you do for Fedora and then finally what do you do for fun? Sure, so and working on Fedora is an acceptable answer. I will say that. Well, yeah, that's kind of really become my hobby There's not a lot of room for pretty much more right now But for a living a work as a data analyst, so it's very much outside of you know, anything Fedora related not really in the Linux or even tech tech world But I was always interested in technology and a couple years back turned about Fedora and I'm like Well, not a couple years back I've always been interested in technology learned about Fedora and I thought I want to plug in because it seemed like a cool opportunity to actually Get involved behind the scenes Primarily that within the Fedora project. I'm on the non-technical side of things my Primarily contributing through the marketing team. Yeah, but you can find my opinions all over the place And for fun right now, it's primarily just working on moving forward some of our marketing team initiatives and also playing around with a Think pad that I got that is new to me, but it's a it's a t4 60 s So it's like eight years old or something but it's running great running Kinoite and it's like everything I wanted from a Chromebook without the Google bits So I'm very happy with that messing around with it. Love it. In fact, that's this one of the many many episodes we have in our backlog is to talk about what Kinoite is and So stay tuned for that. We don't have that one on the we don't have that on the calendar just yet But it isn't in a very large backlog and thank you to each and every one of you for adding to that backlog We've got probably 20 some odd episodes and So that that that list has actually been growing. We just came back from a brief summer break It was a couple months long life got a little lifey there with kids coming home from school So it was it was an interesting it was an interesting summer But the last of my kids goes back to school next week. Yes love my kids love going to pick them up after work Major, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself? Tell us what you do for a living and what you do with for fedora Yeah, and what you do for fun, too So I got my well fedora is fine. I'll go with you on that one so I got my start with fedora back in fedora core 2 and You know slowly starting to figure out how I could get involved manage some packages and things like that and then I Started working for Red Hat and I've done a few different jobs there My current job is really to focus on how do we make red hat enterprise Linux the best that can possibly be in cloud And make it super easy when you know, eventually someone says hey I have all these physical servers running, you know red hat enterprise Linux or something else now I want to go to the cloud. How do I do it? And so so that's a lot of what I do for living so in fedora, I Maintained too many packages. I Try to participate in the fedora cloud group as much as I can we come up with some Good ideas in there and then also I'm part of the fedora steering committee Which is it's really fun and also really challenging to try and figure out, you know Where where fedora should go technically and some some of the decisions are very easy and the other ones get Very sticky and in the weeds and you know really trying to think about how will this affect users and how will it affect? You know fedora's longevity go going forward and so fun outside fedora. Oh man I love to run like it's one of my hobbies even though It's you know 104 Fahrenheit like 40 Celsius outside. I still like to go run kind of crazy and I love doing a ham radio like that's that's another thing Which which goes well fedora because you could do a lot of really fun ham radio things to the computer That's yeah, and and with red hat you're on the engineering side, correct Right. Yep. Gotcha. Yeah, I'm somewhat familiar with rel For those of you that don't know I work as a technical marketer aka and operations advocate on the red hat side in fact, I just Manages scarf in some lunch before this because I was actually live On the rel YouTube channel talking about redhead insights and managing rel instances So it's been a busy day for me, but it's really excited to be Be with you all talking about fedora and definitely glad to have the both of you here with us With me to talk about this So let's let's dive in let's let's give you an easy one first major What so fedora has fedora linux, and that's what we usually all think about it's usually desktop. Some people think server But fedora has this concept of additions spins labs remixes What gives Yeah, so there's there's a mixture of things and I think it's At different levels of maturity, I guess as you go up through there and when I say maturity like Operational maturity like would we would we block a release because a particular thing doesn't build or it doesn't pass tests Well, if it's an addition like if workstation doesn't boot. Oh, we got problems like we need to go back and have a look But if there's a small like specific spin where someone's just getting started developing You know that spin or a remix or something like that And that has an issue that maybe we don't block on the release But maybe we try our best to go, you know help that group figure out like hey Why is this not working like it should so I think the nice thing is it allows people to iterate and gradually move things up and become an addition Which then of course you get a lot more attention you can get more help you can get integrated with a lot of the release automation Things that happen in fedora So I think it's great because you can start with something small and you can get a small community together and say hey Wouldn't it be cool if we had this like for example the the sway maintainers said wouldn't it be cool if we had a Spin that would install sway and super minimal And they could get started really small and then they could start growing and growing and growing You know and eventually that that could be You know a full addition in itself. I think right now it's a spin if I remember I'll have to go check Yeah, but it allows for that iteration and maturity to build over time There's a just a view you were going to add on there a little bit Yeah, I think another way to look at it too is If you you kind of have maybe like the reverse direction of additions being maybe the closest to that these are Specific use cases that fedora is targeting. So if you think of workstation server cloud IOT they're kind of Separate categories in a certain way and then the spins are maybe different versions of those additions If you want to think of it that way So you have the KDE spin the XFCE spin our spins of workstation The other ones as far as I don't really have spins it's primarily because it's primarily you're spinning it off So you could put a different desktop environment Then with the labs those are kind of use case specific but a little more niche So I think if I remember correctly the Neuroscience group that we have I think they have their own lab So that's different. I think there's a gaming lab in the security lab that Tried to do a little bit more. That's and I think even a music oriented one I think it's like the jam lab or something like that Where it is for a specific use case, but it's not as as broad as for like all the different ways You can use computer and it's more about Setting up Fedora for a particular thing and then the last one which I really wanted to mention of a remix is I Guess my understanding is this is almost like a temporary space, right? Because the most recent and really the only entry that I know for this category is the recently announced Fedora Asahi remix So this is one where at least the way that they're using it is this is their way of Existing among the Fedora variants, but really the long-term goal is everything's fully upstream Then you're not really getting as much utilization of that. I don't know a major is that am I Kind of accurate there at least for when it comes to the remixes Yeah, yeah, that's an area where I don't have a lot of experience, but but your summary Sounds accurate to me. Yeah, and it's and like I said, it's a great place for people to come and experiment You know, especially like the Asahi folks saying hey Let's try and put these things together and see if they work and it sounds like they've had a lot of success so far Yeah, we're going it. I will say yeah, if you have anything related to Fedora There's always we'll find a space for you. We'll make new cat. It doesn't matter We'll find a space for for Fedora because I thought something I really enjoy is If someone that has interest in doing something we find a space for it So if you have an idea just bring that over and we'll see how we can support you So so much like a paid-for product has different levels of support like you can buy self-support Standard premium, you know thinking to rel in sort of an unofficial capacity in a community lens these different these different versions of Fedora Linux have Choose my words carefully here Don't want the community coming after me these different Fedora Linux Types have different levels of support and resources available So the the closer you get to the the basic Like workstation like server the more resources are going to be available the more critical Those are to releasing a version into production or into general consumption Okay, I'm those of you listening to the audio version. They're nodding their heads. Yes, so apparently And that well, so But yeah, if you didn't know we actually have a video version that is live on YouTube every every other Tuesday And then usually the following morning we get the audio version released So if you're on one or the other and would prefer the other, you know, that's available there so So that brings us to the crux of the conversation today and that's the Fedora cloud edition now Having been a systems administrator, I'd spent a lot of years managing Linux systems and usually I think rel I think server But I think Fedora my initial reaction is not Fedora server, but Fedora workstation and When we when we decided to do this episode I admitted straight off the top that I was actually wrong about what I thought Fedora cloud edition was I thought it was more of a cloud optimized version of Fedora server But in fact, that's not entirely accurate So I will let you guys duke it out as to who answers first, but we talked about what an addition is So what is Fedora cloud edition specifically? Joseph you're on start. No, no, I'm the marketing guy. I'm here to ask Yeah, you go ahead and I'll answer I'll ask questions where I don't know So I think the best way to explain it is that it's it's Fedora served up a different way So for example, when you do Fedora workstation, you're gonna expect I'm gonna have a graphical interface I'm gonna have a web browser I'm probably gonna have a text editor of some sort and really the goal is is that you have a use case in front of you Where someone wants to be able to connect a mouse and a keyboard to the machine and go build stuff and click and get things done And then when you look at a server The idea is that you want to deliver everything that someone would need to put Fedora on, you know, a small You know small form factor machine all the way up to maybe a for you Dell HP type of large server So then you're thinking about okay. Well, someone doesn't want the graphical interface They're gonna want to make sure that they have all the sorry got an excited dog in the other room They're really gonna be interested in having everything that a server would have so maybe web interface management remotely, maybe you want to have some type of you know CPU error exception checking You know all these different things you want to have and so cloud takes this to another level So cloud almost takes the server mindset and then shrinks it down and says hey What would need to be the smallest set of things that we should put into a fedora deployment that goes into cloud So for example in cloud, you're not gonna need a floppy drive or a CD drive or a kernel with all the modules Let's say you might not need all those modules And then you wouldn't necessarily want to put a whole bunch of packages on there. So for example The cloud deployment has vi for an editor, but no VIM and the reason for that is to shrink it down So if you're deploying a cloud instance You may not need VIM right off the bat if now of course you can install it immediately with DNF and have it But the idea there with cloud is to have this be a building block for something bigger And so that's where you get into the idea of thinking the some people have heard the pets versus cattle analogy You have some people that launch a VM at AWS or Digital Ocean or Linode or wherever you launch And they take care of it as if it's a pet if something goes wrong with it They fight they fix it they make backups of it to make sure they don't lose it But then there's other people that do really broad deployments And their understanding is is I'm gonna deploy 10 of this type of machine Maybe a load balancer or database or something like that. And if I lose one or two, I don't care I'll just put a couple more in its place and I'll be good to go So for people who are thinking in that mindset, we're really trying to build Fedora cloud for them So keep it as small as possible Make it as something that they can use as a building block For something else, but yet also connect them with everything that Fedora has So if you want to turn that into a workstation, you could turn it into a workstation You want to turn into a full-fledged server with you know remote Management over the web you can do that too. There's tons of options available. Hopefully that helps explain some of it so the question that comes to my mind is why not use a tool like image builder to To build out a minimal server image that you would then deploy on the cloud or To the same to the same point. Why would I not just use image builder to build a workstation image? How does how does that approach? differ from using Fedora cloud So the great thing about it is specifically with image builder and if you're not familiar with image builder it It consists of a few different pieces of software that together will go and not only build an image for you with with the exact packages that you need inside but it also package it up for you to upload directly into your favorite cloud and Depending on the cloud that you're going into it will actually upload it and import it for you so if you're going to AWS or Google or Azure or Oracle cloud and I think there's one more I'm forgetting It will automatically upload Alibaba. I think yeah, it'll automatically ship it to the cloud And so you'll just specify what you want and say hey go put it in AWS And then just wait, you know, maybe 10 15 minutes and it'll be there depending on your upload speed, of course But yeah, so you have a few options You could take the off-the-shelf Fedora cloud image that you get on you know get fedora.org And then upload it to your favorite cloud and just use the image that's been pre-built and tested Or you have that option to go use image builder and customize it to your heart's content get it the way you like it and Then ship that off to the cloud as well The difference really with with server is really that we try to shrink down that package set as much as possible And then also within cloud You don't have any type of like kickstart based provisioning or provisioning from an ISO or anything like that You're just going to stamp out the same image every time So there's certain things like like cloud in it that you will need inside a cloud image So that way you can read that metadata coming down out of the cloud provider and set up IP addresses and things like that So the Fedora cloud edition is basically more of an opinionated deployment of Either Fedora server or Fedora workstation. It's that opinion that comes into play Very much so we want I mean we as the Fedora cloud You know working group what we really want to see is that you can take this image and take it to nearly any cloud on the planet And you should be able to just boot it and it will go you shouldn't really have to do any additional Configuration or anything like that now the challenging part is the image formats Because Azure wants a different format than AWS Which wants a different format the digital ocean and image builder is a real helper with that Because you could say hey, I need this in a cue cow and boom you have a cue cow I need this in a raw and the raw comes out or a phd or whatever you need. So that's that's where that really comes in handy I'm quite a fan of Image builder actually part of the team that helps support it for the rail side of the house So I love playing with Fedora's image builder because it's it's further upstream and you get the new shiny things quicker Go ahead Joseph. Sorry. I had to I had to brag on image builder No, no makes total sense So so when we talk about the main differentiator between cloud and server being that cloud is is much more It's basically the smaller so that it can be that building block or an easy thing that you can plug in and then build off of That, you know, whatever way you see fit Why is that the thing that you're valuing in working in in Fedora cloud is it related to because I know I know I'm kind of speaking out of You know, I'm not super familiar with cloud infrastructure and what have you but I do know that it takes certain amount of resources many times You're paying for how many resources you're using it. It's not as simple as hardware. You might own on-prem So I know there's that aspect of it and I know also with servers in general You want very long like long uptime so the smaller presumably you make an image that less can go wrong I guess it are is it basically all of those things that are a factor Is there a particular one of those or something else that is making you think this is why we want a small package for cloud? Yeah, because everything in cloud is utility priced now. It depends on where you go some cloud providers will say hey you get this size of instance and you get Like all these things, you know, it comes with it for this price like a monthly price Then you'll go to some other ones where it's much more utility price And it's like okay You got to pick how much RAM you want and how much CPU you want and how much network you want And you're gonna pay for each one of those independently and so what we really want to do is I don't want anybody to say wow Like I don't want to deploy Fedora in cloud. Why? Because Fedora is too big or when it boots it's using a gig of RAM or it's taking up 20 gigs of disk space for all the packages So if we can have Fedora come up and it's using I don't know under 256 megs of RAM and then you know Under two gigs of disk space then it does two things for the person who's using it One is they can go the smaller instance and save money, which is which is awesome Or they can go with the same size instance They have before and have more disk space and more memory to expand everything that they want to deploy So it lets them go a little bit further So it's not we're not all looking about shrinking things to we also want it to be more cloud integrated So like for example, when you get Fedora server, you have the firmware update managers You can update your server's firmware underneath. You also have IPMI tools. You can manage the IPMI You know like the out of band management that's in the server We want the same thing for cloud and so that's why we package up like AWS CLI Azure CLI Some other cloud providers CLI as well because then from inside that instance you can actually administer your cloud deployment So for example at AWS you can You could create an access policy that says hey This instance can put data in Amazon S3, you know object storage And then you don't have to give it any credentials. You assign the policy to the instance And then you say hey, I need to drop all files in S3 It does a quick check to see what instance roll your instance has and the boom you're dropping files off an S3 And no one gave you a password or an API key or anything So those integrations are really what we're trying to to build out as well So when you do that deployment stuff in the cloud just works, you don't have to go and find software in other places So I imagine if If Fedora cloud is designed to be very streamlined and very Very compact I imagine that there's some kind of intelligence in the installer of the deployment mechanism that That says oh, I'm running on top of AWS or a I'm running on top of Azure so instead of Instead of deploying on Azure you get all this all the tools you get Azure AWS CLI and GCPs G Cloud tool There's there's some sort of intelligence that says oh, I'm running on top of AWS So at the moment We do that via image builder. So in the image builder knows what the base requirements are for example Azure has an agent That can run inside the instance But it doesn't make sense to put that agent outside of Azure and so it only starts up if you're running inside of Azure Most other things like as far as cloud in it goes like the initial metadata and the insulator You know the initial configuration That's pretty standard across almost all cloud providers cloud in it has kind of leveled the playing field Among all of them, but we really like to get to start putting some of these tools on the right images from the start so for example Another AWS feature we're trying to put a tool in there so that you can easily mount the elastic file store Without having to know all the NFS Insanity You would just basically the command that it shows in the AWS console You would just copy paste it in Fedora and go so you don't have to Do the the NFS for dance and train figure out What's happening there? There's a watchdog that's included in some other stuff So if the mount goes down it could take certain actions So we had a question in chat Basically, where can I get Fedora cloud? Yes, so the easiest way is that if you go to get fedora.org which I think it's is that get fedora.org. I always forget Still work Yeah, that's a new site That's always been the one I've always gone to so if you go to get fedora.org There is an option on there in the second row for Fedora cloud And so if you click on the download download now link there, you'll have some options Of course, some of these options are I want to download that image and then upload it to a cloud and import it And then with AWS you can actually click on the little table and it'll pop up a screen that lets you just click and directly launch So if you're already logged into the EC2 console, you can just launch it We're working to expand that into Azure now We've got a few challenges with the way we generate the Azure image files that we've still got to work out And then eventually we'd like to get that for some other providers, too And then image builder is also an option so you can you can install image builder on a fedora machine that you have laying around and and build straight from there I Sense another I sense another episode being added to our backlog right now But or the image builder tool is amazing. I cannot say enough good things about it And you can run it in a container as well, which is which means you can run it and get have actions So if you want to have fedora images that are uploaded Frequently via get have actions you can do that as well. Oh Yeah, that way your image is always up to date. I like this idea Go ahead Joseph, sorry. No, yeah, I just I Forget where it is that I heard that but I did hear I I've heard image builder already something like it Which is probably the same thing come up in a few different for our discussion So I feel like it may come up more often It might even be tied to one of the initiatives, but I can't remember off the top of my head So that'll be exciting Another question came in over chat here. Is it possible to deploy fedora cloud via terraform? Or is this it available in any of the cloud marketplaces? So, yes in AWS right now it gets automatically Uploaded and it's in the interface. So actually every night There's nightly images uploaded for every stable release and then rawhide gets new images uploaded every night So if you want to live on the edge and get the absolute latest code It's dropped there nightly and you can launch those. So the best way to do it with terraform I don't have any code handy but I know there there's some demos on their site or some explanations there where you basically need to match a String like fedora cloud base and then the version number that you want Tell terraform to grab you the latest one and you'll be good to go or you can just get the AMI and AWS And just hard-coded and then change it when the when a new release comes out on other clouds for example Digital ocean and vulture and Hedzner I know for sure and I haven't checked lindo in a while, but I believe they have it as well They have their own fedora builds that they've done It doesn't mean that you have to use those you can still upload your own Create one with the image builder or download one from the site and upload it yourself But there various other providers have have built their own fedora images They may not match the experience that you get with fedora cloud Like sometimes they'll use the root user as the default whereas we prefer use fedora as the default Yes So let's let's talk a little bit about history here. How did how did the cloud edition come to be where? What was the what was kind of the triggering event that says we need to focus on this? That's a good question because it was a little bit before I got involved with the cloud effort But I think where a lot of this stems from is I think it's people working on red hat enterprise Linux sit down They say hey, we need to we need to experiment like we need to work with the community We need to just figure this out like what does this look like and so I think You know really trying to figure out like what is this cloud edition mean like some of the same stuff We talked about before is it just server or is it server minus something or is the server minus something? But we add something else And I think that's really the question that it comes down to because if you really think about it when you're building a Container image you're you're like man, how small can I go? But then when it comes to cloud you're like, okay Well, I got to put a kernel in there and I got to put some system management Utilities and then cloud net which requires Python so it's going to get a little bit larger But honestly, I don't I don't really know how it got started, but that would be my best guess based on what I've seen so far Okay, so it wasn't because I know sometimes it'll be initiatives that maybe start in fedora that were just kind of organic from within the community then later on Red hat decides to take that and run with it But in this case, it seems like this is right at having an idea and then thinking the best place to Work this out is in fedora and in that context and then see see what comes out of it And I think that's a great thing about fedora is that sometimes we'll we'll hit a problem Or a customer will ask us for something and we sit there and we think that's a really good idea You know, we haven't thought about it from that perspective before and we thought let's take it to the community And see if maybe other people have run into this How they're solving it and maybe we can solve it in a better way together Sometimes that works super well and sometimes it creates arguments But but it usually works out pretty well And it's it's really exciting to see initiatives like like the cloud cloud edition things like the shift to pod man things like that that can either start from the enterprise side of the house and work and and the Enterprise side circles around upstream and says hey fedora community. Let's we want to try this out Let's let's test it out. Let's see what happens. Let's try it or sometimes things come in at the community And then the enterprise side is like oh Yeah, that may work for Fedora workstation, but I could see a real use for that in like VDI desktops or something and and then adopting and putting resources behind it to help make that make sure that initiative is successful and Cloud providers too sometimes they show up and and say hey wait a minute like we've got a mutual customer or We've seen this done somewhere else can can y'all do the same thing And then we'll have a conversation with that as well I mean we love it when the providers jump into the fedora cloud sake and we've got a few in there as well David that runs the sig Works for AWS and so he brings in a whole lot of of knowledge and experience from his side of like hey Let's do this, but let's avoid that that kind of things. It's very helpful Actually have a It's a small question, but I wonder so I know that Amazon Linux Amazon Linux Since I think Amazon Linux 2022 and then 2023 that's based on fedora But I know it's very much like based on fedora, but then they change a whole lot So this is not You know just the simple, you know, let's let's change a few things you're in there and then call it a day I know that the more goes into it Do you happen to know if if a lot of what's happening in Fedora cloud also goes into Amazon Linux or Maybe you don't have this just fine, but I was just curious if there was any Collaboration there for for Amazon Linux. Yeah, so we We do have a call between some folks that work on fedora and some folks at AWS and we talk about challenges We talk about things that that they want to see or questions that they have And they're working to make sure that some of their improvements Land back into Fedora and so I think it's beneficial for both and we've had some conversations back and forth about you know How best to do documentation? Could we improve the way we handle CVEs like critical security problems and things like that? And then also some of the things that make You know Amazon Linux really good at Amazon is that they've integrated a lot of things That work really well with their cloud and so we said well, hey, why don't we bring some of those integrations directly in Fedora? And get iterating there and let everybody benefit from it and then get some of the other cloud providers to bring in Their bits as well because I think that's the key part is that if you can get if you can make Fedora a really good cloud citizen You know where it's really well integrated and it plays well with the cloud then I think that's a huge win You love to see it It's awesome So I did have another question which is This is kind of what partly threw me off because I knew for the longest time where I fedora cloud is there and it's right next to Fedora server So I'm like I I guess they're related But then I'm looking at the flock and I'm looking at the the programs coming up and I see cloud and KDE and I'm like what? What do you mean KDE in in in like fluffy Fedora server like I don't understand you're breaking my mind here And so I go I look into it watch the talk And I obviously learned a lot about the collaboration between cloud and KDE and virtual desktop becomes the theme of that talk So I guess for maybe to start off on that line of thinking is that is that just one of many use cases? I imagine when it comes to like like deploying virtual desktops in this case that being available now with KDE That's just one of the things that you would be able to use for do or cloud for I mean I know the answer is yes, but I imagine it's not that much of a focus. It's just like a cool new thing you guys can do Yeah, so I mean You definitely could have a workstation in cloud and then with a lot of the Like some of the recent cloud instances that actually have GPUs attached to them If you do any kind of like CAD work or blender or stuff like that where you need like really powerful CPU and GPU to crunch You know lots of numbers and things like that and generate all these images It could be really awesome to put this in cloud because then the great thing is is like you can have this instance Like you may need a machine that costs $20,000 to do this work And you need sitting next to you and making your office really hot And you'll make your family members really angry that you spent $20,000 But you may be able to run over to a cloud and say hey wait a minute I Only need this thing for about six hours a day like I have six to eight hours a day and Per hour it's 10 cents an hour or I don't know 50 cents an hour or a dollar an hour and you sit there You think well wait a minute. Let me do the math That's not that bad like if I'm only gonna use it eight hours a day five days a week Maybe instead I just rent that VM And then I keep the storage hot in the cloud You know I don't destroy my storage and then when I come back in on Tuesday morning I fire up a new instance attached to my storage and then boom I'm back to you know, whatever work that I was doing So that that's one aspect of it But I think another aspect of it too is just sometimes it's really nice to have a desktop in the cloud If you're on someone else's machine, you know, like oh no I need my tools or I need this app that I use all the time or I've got my password manager So I don't know whatever maybe it happens to be that you just really love that environment Then you can connect to it from anywhere And you don't have to have that locally and you can start doing work You know on an iPad or an Android tablet or something and connect to that instance and do your work with with a very small machine right next to you So that's not something that the Fedora cloud edition is it's not something we're directly working on putting in addition But it's really exciting to see Other groups say hey wait a minute like what if we did this in cloud like what value would we get from it? And I would say on the on the red hat side there. There's some things being done there as well to really help people that do Like animation animation studios Because they have the same problem with workers working from home You don't want to put a twenty thirty forty thousand dollar machine under their desk But you can go in the cloud and say how much is it per day per worker to? You know have them have a place to work, you know with with really good equipment on the on the backside Yeah, that's a really good point I remember I forget when it was but it was a little while back where I was reading a report on The enterprise Linux ecosystems remaining the preferred platform for a certain animation works Like the stuff like when you think of like Pixar illumination like these these folks are are using our politics Which is its own cool thing and and maybe we'll be able to talk about that a little more in depth Well, not even just enterprise Linux, but Well red had enterprise Linux is the preferred platform for is part of the reference architecture for the VFX Alliance I think is what it's called but it's basically that's probably exactly what I mean industry standards group and That that announcement came out about a year year and a half ago or so right around not too long after rail nine was launched and Well introduced rail workstations as part of an AWS offering Sorry, but I also work on the Ralph Ralph for workstations marketing pods But but yeah, most of that work comes from Fedora I mean if if I went for Fedora's work with the GNOME project and working on or in this case can take KDE And both GNOME and KDE working together to improve desktop tools We wouldn't be able to do something like that with Ralph And and I'm back in the day I used to do this with with tiger VNC and you know remote servers and the screen was so slow to refresh and then someone showed me recently Someone did a demo for me recently of like the well a rail workstation. I think Amazon has their own client It's not VNC related. It's ECV. No Nice nice DCV. Yeah, and when I saw the demo I was it was literally like they were working on a machine that was sitting in the next room I was impressed and it was halfway across the country. So I don't know technologies come a long way on remote desktop Yeah, we and I host a show on on the rail YouTube channel called Represents and we had we had an episode about Ralph for workstations in AWS And our guest was literally making changes using open source tools like I think I think he was using blender and was Had had a had basically a room and was changing the lighting effects And even even through the lag of the live stream, you could tell that his experience was so smooth I couldn't imagine. I mean what I do is type in a terminal and if there's lag on that then you're like There's there's a major internet problem To be able to do something as critical as Changing like the pixel size or changing the angle of a lighting source. I mean, that's that's intensive work and the The the low latency of that connection is just unbelievable Yeah, that's great here because I don't for work The reason it piqued my interest is because I've seen this in a few different places where I've worked where obviously I'm on You know, we think of a company. There's the IT department And then there's the guy who makes the tickets and I'm the guy who makes the tickets Of like something went wrong. What's happening here? You know, what have you? but I've had to work and Almost every place that I've been in some some form of remote desktop At which I understand for various like security reasons and implementation reasons and what have you And they've always not been like the best experience and there's also been windows environments So that's why it was personally exciting to me is Yeah, but uh thinking about like virtual desktops and then thinking about that You can get good performance on them for the end user I mean even now among my my co-workers. It's a common complaint that We long so desperately to work locally because our virtual desktop is it's fine But you feel it and it doesn't make for a good experience. So that's why that piqued my interest I'm happy for it and that is definitely When the year of the Linux desktop happens, that's a category that I am also still watching for Is that still a thing? I had to it's a meme I had to the year of the remote Linux desktop There you go that could be it So got a couple more questions for you and and if you're if you're following along with us feel free to To put your questions into chat. We'll try and try our best to cover those live But so what are the future plans? What's what's coming? What's new? What's exciting? Either either what what do you see or what are what are some of the goals for the fedora cloud edition? So I think there's a few like first is really Getting more of those integrations. So having it so that You know fedora is better integrated into these clouds so that there's no There's no features that you can't take advantage of you know, I want you You know within the group It's like hey if you deploy on on cloud y or cloud z You should be able to consume all of their services like their biggest most popular services as easily as possible And if there's anything missing from fedora like if it's a configuration or if it's a package or if it's Something like that we want to say hey, what is that and how do we make it better? And then how does it change the user experience? And then of course document it so people know how to use it I think the second part is really trying to understand how do we expand into more clouds With an image that was built by the fedora community So like I said before there are some of these clouds where we're not there right now So like azure and google is one of them now, of course with image builder and downloading the image and uploading it yourself You're there in 10 20 minutes tops But we really want to get into those clouds and then some of these other clouds where they build their own image We'd really like to work with them to say hey, how do we provide you an image that meets all your requirements? Uh, but yet still matches You know all the standard things that people are going to expect to find uh in fedora That's another part and then kind of the really forward-looking stuff is if someone asked recently if you haven't looked at coro s Someone said well, why do we have cloud and coro s and then some of us kind of stood back and scratched your heads for a bit And so maybe there's an avenue there Maybe the maybe the cloud edition Transforms into being more like coro s maybe coro s becomes a cloud edition. I really don't know But we're in some just initial discussions around that just to see like what this even means So into break off your thought for just a second For those of you that don't know coro s is based on rpm os tree Which basically if if that's a new concept think of it like Like your phone where you're running you're running your mobile device You've you you've got your operating system. You've got your apps. You've got your user data and then From there you download the next version and your your device reboots into that new version Think of think of that same concept at the server level Well, I guess not even server level. I know of some organizations that are using rpm os tree based builds for desktops So that that makes a lot of sense because Your workloads continue to function continue to function and continue to function until that update is ready You you hear this talked about it a lot in terms of cloud deployments or edge Where your where your device may not have the best internet pipe that that it can have And so by downloading that update and not booting into it until that update is ready to be employed That that's kind of some of the advantages. It's far more far more involved in that but at a basic level That's the difference between a Is it transit transactional? is that Anyway, that's the difference between that's between the difference between an rpm based distribution that's managed by something like dnf and rpm os tree So sorry, I wanted to i'm probably cognizant of the fact that This kind of got enterprising real quick But we have people from all over the community and some folks are just interested in and trying out all the different desktop environments so If if you join us in the chat or in the comments feel free to let us know if if there's ever a term that you don't acknowledge I want this to be to be helpful So sorry major didn't didn't mean that's okay. Yeah, I know And I think the greatest part about the fedora core os experience and and I use it myself to run quite a bit A container infrastructure is that that it does exactly that it gets you from zero to containers really fast So if you just say hey, I have these three containers or I've got Wordpress my sql and a load balancer. I need to deploy You're you're there fast like there's no os configuration or installing packages or whatever Load the containers up and go The other nice thing too is that that update mechanism you can configure it to your heart's content When it runs how it runs what it does after it runs And so for me, I know that every two weeks on friday in the morning My machine is going to update and get the newest update which means it's going to reboot I'm going to get an alarm for my monitoring and then the alarm clears and I'm like All right good Back to work So you don't really have to think about that the other nice thing is too is that If at any point you have a bug You can tell someone exactly where your system is you can give them the exact state of the system They can bring up a system that's identical and reproduce your bug So it's not like I have these packages installed with this weird config in the corner It's like no, this is what my system looks like For sure And then that kind of ties into our last question for you And at least our last documented question I'll see if joseph has some curve balls for you, but you're talking about trying to get fedora cloud into more clouds And so I get asked the question frequently How can I contribute? So if someone is really excited about this they heard this episode and they are in love with what you're doing now How can they get involved? So I think the the best way is to join Our matrix chat so on the fedora matrix server. It's the room. It's just called cloud And then hopefully if if the libera chat gets uh, or libera libera libera, I don't know If it gets connected back again to matrix, I'll be very happy But we have pound fedora dash cloud and there as well and that's the best way to get in touch with us We also have a repo in pagure That's cloud dash sig and you can open issues or ask a question But really honestly if you want to get involved one of the easiest ways is to It's just reach out to some of these cloud providers and just say hey like what What would it take for us to have this image in there? Or what are your requirements or how can we supply this? So if you if you work for one of these providers or if you know somebody who works for one of these providers Um, a lot of what we do is word of mouth. Hey, do you know someone who works there? Oh, you know her? Okay, cool. Let me connect you with her. Yeah, okay. You know him over at that place Okay Like let's start talking And then once we start opening the doors usually people are like, oh, yeah We don't want to build these images anymore. Can y'all build these images? That's usually how the conversation goes. Um, and then also just more use cases Um, so like I said before, you know, the big two use cases are like I I have a pet and I and I treat it like You know, uh, like it has to be there every day and then More like the cattle aspect where it's like I have a lot of these and if I lose some I'm going to be upset But I'll just replace them immediately Uh, just better understanding these use cases of what people are trying to do some of the workstation stuff is interesting And then trying to understand like what clouds Like which clouds would be more interesting for fedora to be in or integrations. Maybe that we're missing between those clouds But we always have plenty of little, uh, easy bugs. Well Sometimes easy bugs, uh to work on with certain cloud providers So if you if there's a bug in linode and you're like, oh, I'm in linode all the time I can go fix that bug. We would love to have you Because keeping track of all the different cloud providers and testing infrastructure in each one could sometimes get a little bit challenging There was a question that I had uh, or I I asked about it. Um, surrounding documentation Um, I is that From what I saw it seemed like that was an area like a goal to to develop a little bit more Um, is there any kind of like structure or initiative that someone interested in contributing should plug into on your end? Or is it more just hey if you're interested in documentation in general just get in touch and either we'll give you direction or Just just document what you're familiar with What direction would you get for someone who wanted to contribute that way? The more the latter we're we're pretty informal, uh, so far, but we really do want to have, um Some things that better answer some of these questions like some of the questions that have popped up here Like where can I get fedora and where you know, okay? I can't I fedora doesn't exist at my cloud How do I put it there? Um, you know having this kind of documentation available all in one place. Um I love the fedora coro s documentation For this aspect because they have all these things where they're like, hey, do you want to configure this? Here's exactly what you need. You want to do this? Here's exactly what you need and I would love for us to get the same thing for cloud so If people feel like they have some knowledge on how to deploy an image and their favorite cloud or in various clouds We would gladly welcome the help, but we don't have anything terribly structured So far so if you're okay with working with some unstructured stuff and trying to figure out where to put things Like this is the place to go. No, that's an opportunity. That's a leadership opportunity is what that is. There you go And now you own it and then you can you can do what you got to do. That's how it is either side There's structure of general fedora pro tip either there's structure or there's not and if there's no structure Guess who gets to make the structure you do Yeah, so yeah, so I also mentioned that just I guess fedora broadly But don't be spooked if you see that, you know, that's an opportunity for you if you have the initiative to To take it and and run with it and that be a big value add on your part Yeah, and we have a nice. Oh go ahead embrace the uncomfortableness because when when I started asking around like February march about uh about bringing the fedora podcast back It was it was kind of uncomfortable because it's like, yeah, if you want to do it, it's like Yeah, but shouldn't there be rules Meetings processes. Is there something I need to there's something do I need to fill out something? They're like no just go for it Yeah, yeah, I'm still not sure if I'm doing this right, but we're we're just going to keep plowing ahead Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's uh You mentioned that because there may be some folks turn up and they hear crickets, you know They're like, I don't I didn't get a response or they didn't know what to do So sometimes it's about exploring because maybe the people you're looking for aren't the spots that you checked But sometimes there isn't something going on there and I really do think hey, that's An opportunity a chance for you to do something and and you to develop the structure to get it going So yeah, I yeah, that's how it is for for a few corners of the project and You know ring, you know if someone would gumption go for it. We're happy to support you Well, uh We're getting close to the top of the hour So closing thoughts joseph you want to you want to kick us off with just We'll go around the horn real quick and close this up Sure. Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. Uh nature. I think it was um, a really good insight into Like fedora cloud and how that specifically fits in especially when it gets around like As the marketing guy again, right like having good messaging for the use case of each edition I have a much better idea now to to be able to speak to that Um, I also wanted to do I don't know if you would have said this already, but I did want to make sure it came up is Um, if you could mention your your mastodon handle because I think that's a great resource I'm looking I it doesn't make sense to me, but I know that it's valuable. So I do try to you know boost that one when I see it Um, and I do want anyone who's interested in fedora cloud follow major on mastodon because he's he's giving updates regularly there Um, is is it at major? I don't know if it's on fostered on but Put your hand. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a major on fostered on A fostered on dot org cool. So, yeah, that's it for me. Just thanks Major any any closing thoughts? Yeah, no first. I'll thank y'all for having me. This has been uh, really fun and yeah, I think the the biggest takeaway I would say is that uh, you know Cloud is not a panacea, but it certainly is fun and it's it's fun to Be able to deploy something and tear it down and deploy something else and change it up and you know, if you make a mistake Okay, cool. Hit the delete button and go try again. Um So if if you're of that mindset, um, and you're really interested in experimenting and kind of stepping into the unknown And and taking on some of these leadership opportunities as as he said shows up We'd love to have you so um and then also too, you know if uh, uh If you're familiar with a certain cloud provider and you really love using fedora there and you're like, man I wish it had this or it didn't have this, you know, come on by and talk about it Uh, you don't need to open an issue or anything. Just jump into the chat or come to our, uh Meetings, uh every thursday Awesome, um So, uh, joseph, do you want to uh, you want to tease out our next episode? Oh, sure. Okay, so The next episode I think is definitely one that i'll be able to speak to a little bit better. Um, We should actually be having on mark pierce from lenovo So that'll be very exciting. Um, they did we're very grateful to lenovo specifically because they were one of our sponsors for flock So that helped the time and um going to enable things not just a flock, but maybe other things in the future And the marketing team has been working closely with them on trying to Uh Make some progress when it comes to shipping fedora. It's also tied to an initiative lots of cool fun stuff there So and I'll be there too So but I actually I can speak to some of the work there because that has there has actually been collaboration between Um myself and lenovo So it's very exciting and if you're interested in lenovo and fedora on lenovo and buying fedora from lenovo Come check out the next the podcast episode Yep, we will be live in two weeks on the same channel Bear with us. Uh, now that now that summer break is kind of wrapping up I'm back to looking at where else does this podcast need to be? We've got the youtube version and the audio podcast But we're eventually hoping to include some some demos and some hands-on type materials as well So definitely want to try and get this out there more places So if you want to help with that feel free to drop into the podcast matrix room Um, definitely join the the fedora matrix space. There are rooms for just about everything Some of them are geo based some of them are project based others are just kind of fedora social hangouts excuse me But there's there's one for the fedora podcast as well jump in there I could use all the help I can get uh joseph. Thank you so much for jumping in as co-host again Really appreciate your your uh your your thoughts your questions your opinions really uh really made made this episode what it was Major thank you for jumping in you kind of got volun told to do this episode. It kind of feels like so Thank you for thank you for joining us Happy to be here. Thank you Yeah, this was great. And I think I signed up for only two new topics today. So we're we're we're doing okay So so actually was asked to do an episode about for fedora Coro s and then when I do the show notes, I'll look at the other one that I already volunteered myself to do so Um, if you would like to be a guest on the show again reach out to me I'm easy to find anywhere it guy eric As well as in the podcast matrix room We've got tons of episodes, but in the works, but we need uh people to talk to talk to them So, um, I tend to learn about as much as all of you when when uh when I go to prep for one of these episodes The only difference is I get to do mine before we're live. So I do my prep and my research beforehand. That's the only difference but On behalf of my co-host joseph and my guest today major and uh on behalf of the entire fedora linux community Thank you all for joining us so much make sure to subscribe to get uh notified anytime we go live or anytime We publish a new episode and until then we will see you again in two weeks. Thank you all Bye