Anytime builder VMs for devs (was: test infrastructure ideas appreciated ...)

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 4:14 AM, Bjoern Michaelsen
<bjoern.michaelsen at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 02:33:23PM +0100, Michael Meeks wrote:
>>       Constructive thoughts appreciated in reply here.
>
> Budget for 2-5 of our Hackfest VMs[1] to always be on standby for someone
> wanting to do a fast build, and provision for Cloph to be able to hand out
> log-ins at a quick ping on IRC.

The budget is already there.
some tooling to do that smartly is what is needed, as relying on cloph
being alvailable for a quick ping on IRC does not scale very well.

iow to use spot instance provisionning, and to control how many of
them there is and turn them off automatically after a while (based on
idling etc.)
there ia also the credential part of it... and the discovery part of it....
One possibility would be:
have a minimal template root disk with a basic setup and a salt-client
preset to call home a given salt-server (on our infra)
have a script on the salt-server do
1/ accept incomming new client
2/ run some high-state on such client as needed (that will setup
things like user + ssh-keys for the requester on the client) and
report when the box is ready.

Note: using spot instance (which are very cheap on linux) means you
really want to use that for build.. not for coding as the instance may
disappear on you
so code on your laptop send patch/rsync/whatever code-change to the
vm, build and test there.

Note: for actual hackfest, we may provision real instance (not spot)
for the duration of the hakfest..
you can get a quite good box (like the one that I use to do windows
build in 30-40 minutes) at $60 for 72 hours
and for a hackfest we could have a setup with say 6 of these in a
icecream network... for less than $400 for the week-end
which is negligible comparing to travel expenses for these things...
and could support easely a dozen of hackers or more

Norbert