[Thincrust-devel] [Announce] Thincrust - Tools for building virtual appliances

[Bryan Kearney]

We are pleased to announce Thincrust, a collection of tools for building 
virtual appliances.

Thincrust is a set of tools and metadata which make it easier for anyone 
(ISVs, developers, OEMS, etc) to create and deploy virtual appliances. 
These tools are existing fedora tools, which are focused around best 
practices for appliance development and delivery. With these tools 
anyone with basic scripting experience can build virtual appliances.

An appliance is a pre-configured application and operating system 
combination which can be updated via standard package management tools 
or as a single binary blob (ala a toaster). Appliances can be managed 
with on-board management tools, and can integrate with corporate wide 
management consoles. These options allow for easy integration of the 
appliance into the virtualization environment.

There are many versions of appliances. Some are database driven web 
applications combined with an operating system, while others are small 
embedded operating systems (e.g. toasters). Therefore, Thincrust will 
look to provide tooling and metadata to address the common patterns seen 
in appliance development for various scenarios. In addition, it will 
look to collect best practices to aid developers in their work.


Components
===============
Thincrust is composed of:

1. Appliance Operating System (AOS): Minimal operating system definition
2. Appliance Creation Tool (ACT): Tool to create Appliance Images This 
will pull in existing patches from liveCD creator and ovirt. The first 
cut will be kickstart files with the addition of whitelists.
3. Appliance Configuration Engine (ACE): A boot time tool which can be 
used to configure an appliance at initial deployment, and to 
re-configure based on updates or "movement" of the binary (e.g. new ip 
address)
4. Conversion Tools:Tools which allow developers to convert images 
between libvirt (xen/kvm), vmware, and ec2 environments.


Where can I find Thincrust
==========================
The Thincrust website is http://www.thincrust.net/
Downloads can be found at http://www.thincrust.ne/download/
Discussions around Thincrust happen on thincrust-devel,
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/thincrust-devel


Help wanted
===========
Thincrust is a reasonable proof-of-concept as of now; there are lots of
things that need to be done, and we would love for others to pitch
in.

The biggest help would be for folks to download the tooling, and begin
to use the tooling to create appliance recipes. The broader the set
of recipes the more robust the tooling will become. So pick your 
favorite application, and begin to write a recipe for it. Tell us what 
works and what does not work.

Other backlog items can be found here: 
http://thincrust.net/help-backlog.html

--bk