In the last post I walked through the base image that every one of my servers shares. This time I want to look at the first layer on top of it: the cloud image, which adds everything a virtual machine running in a hypervisor environment needs.

The full source is in my gorge.os repository.

Layered images

One of the things I really like about BootC is that you can layer images just like you layer application containers. The cloud image simply starts from the base:

In the last post I explained why I decided to switch to BootC for all my servers. This time I want to walk through what I actually put into my base image - the packages, the config files, and the custom services that make every host feel like home.

The full source is in my gorge.os repository.

The Containerfile structure

Before getting into what’s in the image, I want to explain how I put things into it. The Containerfile is split into three stages: package management, file placement, and service activation.

I have a fair amount of servers that I’m (co-)responsible for. To make my life easier I tried serveral managent tools to do the common tasks for all servers as smooth as possible.
The two tools I mainly use at the moment are ansible and cloud-init.

Cloud-init is a great tool to spin up a new server, or to resore an existing one.
ansible is great to do common tasks, like updating servers, installing packages to multiple hosts, but when it comes to thinks like adding a systemd-service to just a view hosts, it never felt natural to me.