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OS and Artifact Registry Service
planned / on deck
Bob Fraser
A number of customers want to provision images that are not on the standard operating system list. While Equinix Metal allows for provisioning custom images via iPXE this requires maintaining a PXE server.
This feature would allow customers to upload images to a hosted registry that would be distributed across the Metal platform for reliable, scalable, and secure installation on server instances.
Similar to Amazon Elastic Container Registry and similar cloud offerings, it would be ideal if this service supported private repositories with resource-based permissions.
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Sal Carrasco
Merged in a post:
User selectable OS Versions
Manuel Mendez
We are regularly updating the underlying OS images we use for provisioning.
Some users may want to stick to a known good version and slowly test updates on their own terms.
Internal Staff users are able to provision using a non-default OSV and clients can sort of do something similar using magic user-data comments.
While the magic-user-data comment is documented https://metal.equinix.com/developers/docs/operating-systems/custom-images/ its not very obvious/friendly.
A "proper" input field in the Portal or API and info in metadata would be more discoverable and likely add to its use.
This will also ease the ability for 3rd party OS partners to test their images in almost-production safely, including by their own partners/clients.
Bob Fraser
planned / on deck
Marques Johansson
> A "proper" input field in the Portal or API and info in metadata would be more discoverable and likely add to its use.
Yes. Overloading userdata with "Equinix Metal configuration" prevents userdata from being used by the user in typical use cases (cloud-init, ignition, kickstart, gzipped multipart mime).
The existing "operating_system" field could be used with some careful definition of a value whose format would include the needed image_repo and image_tag. (I don't know of a standard git+http format that allows for revision~ish, browse ready references.). The API accepts strings or maps in some places, it could conceivably take an image_repo/image_tag map for operating_system.
Manuel Mendez
Marques Johansson: I wasn't trying to tie in to Custom Images. I'd like to limit this post to only selecting among the EM images.
I agree exposing the image_repo/image_tag somehow makes sense. Maybe even as a Custom OSV where the image_repo is part of the definition?
Marques Johansson
Manuel Mendez: The ability to POST custom images to /organization/{id}/operating-systems (using the repo/tag parameters) would allow for custom slug use when creating devices.
Manuel Mendez
Marques Johansson: Yep, but thats totally new functionality that I think deserves its own post.