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Add summit digest/trip report to docs (#4561)
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Also moved images out of the repo (including the ones from previous
years) and added to the Ubuntu asset manager for hosting to avoid
bloating the repo as time goes on!
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s-makin authored and holmanb committed Nov 14, 2023
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions doc/rtd/development/summit.rst
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Expand Up @@ -22,3 +22,4 @@ Previous summits
cloud-init: Summit 2017 <summit/2017_summit.rst>
summit/2018_summit.rst
summit/2019_summit.rst
summit/2023_summit.rst
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10 changes: 3 additions & 7 deletions doc/rtd/development/summit/2017_summit.rst
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Expand Up @@ -6,10 +6,8 @@ cloud-init: Summit in Seattle, Washington
This article was written by Joshua Powers and `originally published`_ on 31
August 2017. It is shared here `under license`_ with no changes.

.. image:: 2017_seattle.jpg
:alt:
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/e4b097cf-2017_seattle.jpg
:align: center
:scale: 70%

Last week the cloud-init development team from Canonical ran a two-day summit
in Seattle, Washington. The purpose of the summit was to meet with contributors
Expand All @@ -22,8 +20,7 @@ cloud teams, as well as the maintainers of cloud-init from Red Hat, SUSE, and
of course, Ubuntu. Special thanks go to Google for hosting us and to Microsoft
for buying everyone dinner!

.. image:: 2017_meeting.jpg
:alt:
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/8c221862-2017_meeting.jpg
:align: center

Demos
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -65,8 +62,7 @@ During the summit, we took time to have merge review and bug squashing time.
During this time, attendees came with outstanding bugs to discuss possible
fixes as well as go through outstanding merge requests and get live reviews.

.. image:: 2017_bridge.jpg
:alt:
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/ac44f440-2017_bridge.jpg
:align: center

Conclusions
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6 changes: 3 additions & 3 deletions doc/rtd/development/summit/2018_summit.rst
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Expand Up @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ cloud-init: Summit 2018
This article was written by Joshua Powers and `originally published`_ on 27
August 2018. It is shared here `under license`_ with no changes.

.. image:: 2018_waterfront.jpg
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/04d0b05b-2018_waterfront.jpg
:alt: Seattle waterfront
:align: center

Expand All @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ Like last year, the even was held in Seattle, Washington. A special thanks goes
to Microsoft for providing breakfast and lunch while hosting us and to the
Amazon Linux and AWS teams for buying everyone dinner!

.. image:: 2018_roadmap.jpg
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/78642b7c-2018_roadmap.jpg
:alt: Roadmap talk
:align: center

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ During the summit, we took time to have merge review and bug squashing time.
During this time, attendees came with outstanding bugs to discuss possible
fixes as well as go through outstanding merge requests and get live reviews.

.. image:: 2018_talk.jpg
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/7d203365-2018_talk.jpg
:alt: Another talk
:align: center

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4 changes: 2 additions & 2 deletions doc/rtd/development/summit/2019_summit.rst
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Expand Up @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ cloud-init: Summit 2019
This article was written by Joshua Powers and `originally published`_ on 21
October 2019. It is shared here `under license`_ with no changes.

.. image:: 2019_market.jpg
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/e0319f90-2019_market.jpg
:alt: Seattle market
:align: center

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ During the summit, we took time to have merge review and bug squashing time.
During this time, attendees came with outstanding bugs to discuss possible
fixes as well as go through outstanding merge requests and get live reviews.

.. image:: 2019_amazon.jpg
.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/d774b249-2019_amazon.jpg
:alt: Another talk
:align: center

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cloud-init: Summit 2023
***********************

After a three-year hiatus the two-day cloud-init summit finally resumed in
August, giving Canonical a chance to reconnect with the community in person,
and to realign on the direction and goals of the project.

.. figure:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/d8ed72fb-2023_image1.jpg
:alt: Man running along a trail through the forest near the venue
:align: center

Enjoying a jog through the beautiful forest around the Microsoft Redmond
campus!

The event was generously hosted by Microsoft this year at their Redmond campus
in Seattle, Washington, and we are grateful to the Microsoft community members
"on the ground" who coordinated with Canonical's cloud-init development team to
help organise and run the event. Big thanks go as well to the Canonical
community team for helping us to set up the event site, as well as for their
support and guidance with all the planning involved.

As in previous years, the summit was a great opportunity for cloud-init
contributors to get together and discuss the most recent developments in the
project, provide demos of new features, resolve outstanding issues, and shape
the future development direction of the project. It was wonderful to see some
"old" faces again after such a long time, as well as getting to meet some of
our newer contributors in person.

The first hybrid summit
=======================

This summit was organised as a hybrid event for the first time, and despite
some initial uncertainties about how to implement that, it worked very well.
In-person attendees included developers and contributors from Microsoft,
Google, Amazon, Oracle, openSUSE and we had remote presentations provided by
FreeBSD and AlpineLinux maintainers.

In addition to our in-person gathering, we also had lively participation from
our remote attendees from around the world. With this hybrid format allowing
attendance from community members who might not otherwise have been able to
take part, this is a format that we’ll want to carry forward to next year to
open the event to the widest possible audience.

Special thanks go to Canonical for sponsoring the dinner! It was a great chance
to build community interactions "after hours", with topics ranging far and
wide. Overall, it was a perfect opportunity to dig into industry dynamics that
influence cloud-init engagement.

.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/2687e23a-2023_image3.jpg
:alt: The in-person participants enjoying the group dinner
:align: center

Highlights of the discussions
=============================

Thanks to all our presenters; Mina Galic (FreeBSD) and Dermot Bradley
(AlpineLinux), Chris Patterson (Microsoft) James Falcon, Brett Holman,
Catherine Redfield, Alberto Contreras, Sally Makin, John Chittum, Daniel
Bungert and Chad Smith. You really helped to make this event a success.

Presentation take-aways
-----------------------

* **Integration-testing tour/demo**: James showed how Canonical uses our
integration tests and pycloudlib during SRU verification, and demonstrated
how we think other clouds should be involved in standard evaluation of
cloud-init releases before publication.

There was interest in leveraging this testing at openSUSE, Amazon Linux and
possibly Microsoft’s Mariner; they may be looking to extend our framework for
their release testing. Our homework from this is improved developer docs on
extending integration tests for other distributions.

Azure are looking to invest in distribution-agnostic integration test
frameworks and want to knowledge-share with the cloud-init community on that.

* **Security-policy for cloud-init CVE handling**: Our community would like
Canonical to provide more context during the embargo period on CVEs about the
mitigation steps required. This is especially the case in any downstream
packaging, to allow downstream package maintainers more time to prepare.

* **Cloud platforms want/like strict schema validation** and errors on invalid
user-data/config. They also requested more visibility into any warnings
surfaced by cloud-init with simple tools so that they can avoid costly "log
spelunking".

This aligns well with Brett’s ongoing roadmap work to raise warnings from the
CLI and some of the strict JSON schema validation on network-config and user
data/vendor data.

* Good lessons from both AlpineLinux (Dermot Bradley), who investigated SSH
alternatives like dropbearSSH and tinySSH, and FreeBSD (Mina Galić), who
reported on the development and publishing process and on finding better ways
for FreeBSD and Alpine to engage with clouds, so they can get sponsorship of
open source images with cloud-init hosted in AWS.

.. image:: https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/5640b4ed-2023_image2.jpg
:alt: Overview of the meeting room, with the remote-attending participants
:align: center

Round-table discussions
-----------------------

* **Boot-speed**: The discussion hosted by Catherine, Alberto and Chad
confirmed that our ongoing boot speed work is critical to clouds and
cloud-customers, who continue to gauge boot speed based on wall time to SSH
into the instance.

This is a more critical measurement than the time to all services being up.
In our discussion, we received feedback that every millisecond counts. We
also learned that there is hesitation about moving to precompiled languages
such as Go, due to the potential image size impacts, or Rust, due to the
somewhat limited platform support.

Partners are also looking for `cloud-init analyze` to report on external
systemd-related impacts (such as `NetworkManager-wait-online.service` or
`systemd-network-wait-online.service` delays) due to external units/services
that affect boot.

* **Review of our Python support matrix** for all downstreams, with the goal of
Python 3.6 version deprecation. Due to ongoing downstream support needs, we
are looking to retain Python 3.6 support until March 2024.

* **Shared test frameworks**: Azure intends to invest in integration testing
with the cloud-init community, to develop distribution-agnostic best
practices for verification of distribution releases, and boot-speed and image
health analysis. If there are ways we want to collaborate on generalised
testing and verification of images, they may provide some development toward
this cause.

Breakout sessions
-----------------

* **Private reviews of partner engagements** with Oracle and AWS, and Fabio
Martins, Kyler Horner, and James to prioritise ongoing work and plan for the
future development of IPv6-only datasource support - as well as other
features.

* **Brett and openSUSE’s Robert Schweikert** worked through downstream patch
review with the intent of merging many openSUSE patches upstream. Amazon
Linux has a couple of downstream patches that they may want to upstream as
well.

Conclusions
===========

This two-day event gave us a fantastic chance to take the pulse of the
cloud-init project. It’s given us a healthy understanding of areas in which we
can better serve the community and how we can continue to build momentum.

Meeting face-to-face to reflect our cloud-init plans with the community helped
confirm interest in some of the usability features we are developing, such as
better error and warning visibility and improving boot speed in cloud-init.
There is plenty of enthusiasm for continued collaboration on improved testing
and verification that all distributions and clouds can leverage.

We also appreciated the opportunity to get valuable feedback on our
documentation, our communication, and our security processes. We’ve also
discussed and gained input into better practices we can adopt through GitHub
automation, workflows that automate pull request digests, and upstream test
matrix coverage for downstreams (beside Ubuntu). All of these things will help
us to maintain the momentum of the cloud-init project and ensure that we are
best serving the needs of our community.

Thank you!
==========

This event could not have taken place without the hard work and preparation of
all our presenters, organisers, and the voices of our community members in
attendance. So, thank you again to everyone who participated, and we very much
hope to see you again at the next cloud-init summit!

Notes of both days can be found on the `cloud-init mailing list`_, and also
are `hosted in our GitHub`_ repository. There you will find additional details
about each topic and related discussions.

Finally, if you are interested in following or getting involved in cloud-init
development check out #cloud-init on Libera.chat or subscribe to the cloud-init
mailing list.

.. LINKS
.. _cloud-init mailing list: https://lists.launchpad.net/cloud-init/msg00460.html
.. _hosted in our GitHub: https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/blob/main/doc/summit/2023_summit_shared_notes.md

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