Stage4 - Packer & Ansible¶

This page describes the current concept for generating stage4 images for the next-gen of OpenSLX.

New concept¶

Use packer to generate fresh images from ISO images. This requires the creation of kickstart/preseed files for the distros we want to support. This approach has the advantage that we can always reproduce a stage4 from scratch at any time.
Once a base image has been created, use ansible to provision them according to their usecases.

An idea is to have one run to build all the components requiring a development environment (dnbd3, xmount, mltk modules) and to extract resulting files/binaries to the machine running packer.
Once all is built, the development layer is thrown away and we start with the base image once again, this time just install the extracted files/binaries and their dependencies to the fresh system.

• Generating base OS images with packer
• Provisioning base images with ansible

Tools¶

• packer
• ansible