Fedora 14 Has Its Head in the Cloud

Concurrent release planned for latest open source technologies for use with EC2

The anticipated Fedora 14 release is about a week away, and in keeping with Fedora’s aim of being at the forefront of cutting-edge innovation, the Fedora community is actively engaging in activities which seek to help our users test out the latest in cloud computing technologies. The Fedora 14 “Laughlin” release is scheduled to mark the first of many consecutive releases available for use with Amazon EC2™.

“Offering Fedora on Amazon EC2 is a way to to deploy Fedora on a wider scale. Anyone will be able to have multiple Fedora virtual machines at his or her fingertips quickly,” said Garrett Holmstrom, a Fedora Cloud SIG community member. “On the opposite end of the spectrum, this will give faster and easier access to a dedicated Fedora instance that is accessible from anywhere in the world. People without persistent Internet access will be able to host their web sites using Fedora. Anyone will be able to try out Fedora from a server perspective without needing to install, boot, or even download it themselves.”

“With the planned release of Fedora 14 on EC2, we aim to offer recent and supported versions of Fedora for others to use as-is, or as the basis for their own images,” said Justin Forbes, a Red Hat engineer and Fedora Cloud SIG community member. “Since the official images are now being created and pushed by the Fedora Project instead of a third party, they will be maintained and supported by the Fedora community, just like any Fedora release.”

Of course, community is what keeps the gears of Fedora going, and there is a growing community of contributors that are interested in bringing the capabilities of cloud computing to Fedora . Behind the scenes of getting Fedora 14 running on EC2 infrastructure, the Fedora community has been hard at work developing documentation to make this process repeatable, as well as to show end-users how to access Fedora on EC2. And it wouldn’t be Fedora if we weren’t thinking about the future, now: the Cloud SIG is already working on including additional features for future releases of Fedora such as support for the Sheepdog Distributed Storage Management engine,as well as other open-source cloud projects such as Deltacloud and BoxGrinder.

Forbes added, “Fedora 14 is expected to be available on EC2 the same day it is available for download. The release is scheduled for November 2nd. Documentation will be available with pointers to the Fedora 14 machine images (AMIs) and they should be easy to find in the EC2 web interface as well.”

For more information on Fedora’s cloud initiatives, visit the Cloud special interest group at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_SIG.

To read Justin Forbes’ interview concerning Fedora’s availability on EC2, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_on_EC2.

There is also a Fedora 14 feature page located here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/EC2

Fedora 14 “Laughlin” is scheduled to be available for download on November 2 at the Fedora Project download site: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

EC2 is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc.