FutureGrid Standalone Image Repository

Introduction

The FutureGrid image repository is a standalone service that is not tied to FutureGrid nor to any IaaS infrastructure. This image repository offers a common interface that can distinguish image types for different IaaS frameworks like Nimbus, Eucalyptus, and also bare-metal images. This allows us in FG to include a diverse image set not only contributed by the FG development team, but also by the user community that generates such images and wishes to share them. The images can be described with information about the software stack that is installed on them including versions, libraries, and available services. This information is maintained in the catalog and can be searched by users and/or other FutureGrid services. Users looking for a specific image can discover available images fitting their needs, and find their location in the repository by using the catalog interface.

The repository supports different storage systems that allow you to choose the most appropriate one for you. It includes MySQL, where the image files are stored directly in the POSIX file system; MongoDB, where both data and files are stored in the NoSQL database; the OpenStack Object Store (Swift); and Cumulus from the Nimbus project. For the last two cases, the data can be stored in either MySQL or in MongoDB. These storage plugins not only increase the interoperability of the image repository, but can also be used by the community as templates to create their own plugins to support other storage systems.

Requirement

  • Python 2.6 or 2.7
  • LDAP server for user authentication

Software

The software is open-source under an Apache 2 license. The image repository can be found in github as part of our Image Management and Rain software https://github.com/futuregrid/rain .

Documentation

The documentation can be found in http://futuregrid.github.com/rain/index.html. Since this link provides information about all our tools, in this section we collect the links that refer to the image repository.

User Manual

Information about the command-line interface is found in http://futuregrid.github.com/rain/man-repo.html. If you are interested on using the shell, the manual is in http://futuregrid.github.com/rain/man-shell.html.

Installation

You need to install the complete software, even if you only want to use the image repository. This information is found in http://futuregrid.github.com/rain/install.html.

Configuration

The configuration information can be found in http://futuregrid.github.com/rain/configure_futuregrid.html. You will be interested in: