[katello-devel] Improving Aeolus + Katello integration

[Ohad Levy]

On 07/27/2012 08:48 AM, Ivan Nečas wrote:
> If prepared properly, puppet manifests can be applied even without the
> master present. Especially, if the user that prepares the manifests
> counts on the fact, that it could be run without master (which is not so
> hard to test),  he could then benefit significantly from this. He
> probably still might want to rerun it on instance creation time, but
> it's much faster then running against a JEOS.

True, but you really want to make sure that all services are stopped 
afterwards, until firstoboot would activate/reconfigure them again.

so the bottom line,

creating a new custom image vs using JEOS is an optimization step (less 
time to get a new customized instance to run) due to the fact that you 
upload the content upfront, it should potentially also save some disk 
space (if you would be using snapshots).

saying that, you must make sure that you have nothing specific from the 
image creation time, such as services running etc, so in reality, you 
just want the packages, nothing else.

I would think that using puppet for creating the image is a good idea, 
but might not fit exactly to how puppet works, and you could consider 
adding tags [1] or run stages[2] or simply send a patch to puppet to 
auto tag packages and then you could ask puppet to install only packages.

Ohad

[1] http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Using_Tags
[2] http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/language_guide.html