Bring Your Custom Image to DigitalOcean

https://blog.digitalocean.com/custom-images/

by oedmarap • 8 years ago

98 47 8 years ago

blog.digitalocean.com

A neat feature, though it'd be really nice to get the sort-of opposite and be able to easily download our droplet snapshots or backups to be able to store or run locally as needed.

zatkin2• 8 years ago

This is probably not possible because they want you to stay on their platform.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 8 years ago

That would mean it is possible, just deliberately blocked.

stevekemp2• 8 years ago

Lots of hosts don't want to let you do that, so you can't port your images to other hosts.

That said you can use rsync to transfer the contents of a remote system to a local-snapshot if you wish. It won't cope with changes made during the run of the rsync, but if you coordinate you can migrate easily with this approach if you wish.

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

Actually I have used this method for cross-country migration of vms to a new datacenter. You have to exclude /dev and /proc at a minimum, then run rsync twice or more. Downtime was less than a minute, the time spent to reboot the vm and ensure it came up properly.

otriv• 8 years ago

This is great news for making use of OpenBSD and other non-native OS. Most hosting I've used doesn't support OpenBSD or any other *BSD.

alwillis3• 8 years ago

Digital Ocean has supported FreeBSD for quite a while.

zatkin2• 8 years ago

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are different OSes though.

jedimastert• 8 years ago

BSD is one of those things Ive heard of but know nothing about. What are the pros and cons of choosing BSD over something like Linux?

canhascodez• 8 years ago

BSD has a great firewall, it's usually more integrated than Linux (for certain definitions of "integrated"), and some argue that it's more secure/stable. Some argue that the BSD license is superior. Hardware support and software availability tend to be more hit-or-miss. N.B.: I do not use BSD.

danans• 8 years ago

For a historical perspective ... way back in the day there was Unix at Bell Labs, and one of it's licensed derivatives was made by Berkeley Systems, and hence their distribution was called BSD.

Unix split into 2 main variants, BSD and System 5 Unix. Most commercial derivations were based on System 5, and BSD was used in academia.

A short time later Linus created his own System 5 Unix-inspired OS kernel, Linux, but from clean cloth, and distributed it with userspace tools borrowed from yet another OS project called GNU created by Richard Stallman.

The various BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, etc) are descendants of the original BSD.

People used to say BSD and it's children were "real" Unix and Linux was not, though I don't think many care about that anymore.

carlesfe• 8 years ago

I will say something that is completely incorrect as facts, but helpful as a thought technology:

Choosing BSD over Linux is like choosing Slackware over Elementary. The differences are there, but they're very niche and subtle in the technical side and the philosophical side.

If you've never used a BSD, you can safely think of it as just another linux distro, and use the same reasoning you'd use to choose your favorite distro.

Do you need more specifics on which are those differences? Check out [1] and my own take on [2].

[1] https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

[2] https://cfenollosa.com/blog/openbsd-from-a-veteran-linux-use...

tarunkotia• 8 years ago

One word, Dtrace https://wiki.freebsd.org/DTrace

upofadown• 8 years ago

Well OpenBSD tends to attract OS minimalists. I went to the bother of learning OBSD when I started to get the impression that Linux might be headed towards some sort of complexity crisis. Initially simple servers were the target but I now have a desktop and a laptop on it as well.

h1d2• 8 years ago

Practically I don't really see BSD better, as Linux is more widely used in commercial spaces which means more readily available packages, more edge cases solved, more results on Google and more jobs.

But if you want to be educational and use the OS which invented OpenSSH, pf (firewall that is far easier to read than iptables) and many other useful tools, then you might want to give a go at OpenBSD. It's fun to run it as your home router.

If you want to try zfs without being awkward due to licensing concern and thus cannot be distributed from Linux vendors directly, then FreeBSD is a good choice. NetBSD, I never tried but code seems clean to support quite a range of hardware platforms. DragonflyBSD, is more like a research OS to innovate on new features.

dsies• 8 years ago

It seems to be limited to ext3/4... don’t think it’d be possible to get a native obsd install going on thse.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 8 years ago

And yet, they list bsd-cloudinit, Which is far as I can see is completely a FreeBSD thing, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret that list.

scns• 8 years ago

https://openbsd.amsterdam

Not affiliated

15DCFA8F• 8 years ago

Why only ext3/4 filesystems? Why not XFS?

alexforster• 8 years ago

They likely need to be able to mount your filesystem for some of their features to work. That's how they can reset your root password, write out network configs, etc etc.

Operyl• 8 years ago

Network configs are written out via cloud-init last I checked, hence the requirements on one of the variants.

Also: You must add an SSH key when creating a Droplets from a custom image. These Droplets have password authentication disabled by default and it’s not possible to use the control panel to generate or reset the root password.

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/custom-images/overv...

donatj• 8 years ago

Oh that's so lame. I wanted to run something exotic like BeOS or Plan 9. PoorMan in BeOS was the first public webserver I ever ran! Followed shortly by IIS on Windows 2k... Which should also be an option.

nullcipher• 8 years ago

Can we share custom images with others?

simplify• 8 years ago

I wonder if this is compatible with unikernals like MirageOS? https://mirage.io

hamandcheese• 8 years ago

Any Linux OS that supports ext3/4 file systems and has cloudinit 0.7.7, cloudbase-init, coreos-cloudinit, ignition, or bsd-cloudinit

So my guess is no.

EB66• 8 years ago

I don't really see how this is newsworthy... I've been purchasing virtualization and cloud services from a variety of smaller providers for years -- without fail, all of them are more than happy to provision custom images. My current provider, Reprise Hosting, accepts custom images without extra fees and without caveats to their SLA.

moondev• 8 years ago

It's a blog announcing a new feature for their platform. It's not like they are taking an ad out on the New York times.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

You can still advertise without taking an ad out in the New York Times, and this post is clearly advertising.

tuananh2• 8 years ago

i remember DO has been promising to deliver custom image since like more than 5 years ago.

glad to see it finally happens

jmacd• 8 years ago

aren’t they like, 6 years old?

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

5yrs < 6yrs

tuananh2• 8 years ago

Founded June 24, 2011; 7 years ago

jagger27• 8 years ago

Faaaaantastic. I've been bootstrapping Alpine on top of Debian for a while now.

henkdevries• 8 years ago

Using regular Linux tools you are even able to bootstrap Windows on Digital Ocean (or any kvm vps): https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Windows_7_Installer_on_KVM_Li...

This could be done without custom images. Now it will be easier.

yakshaving_jgt• 8 years ago

Excellent. This should mean no more instability with DigitalOcean as a deploy target for NixOps.

tyingq• 8 years ago

Vultr also offers this, and has for years. https://www.vultr.com/features/uploadiso/

gradschool• 8 years ago

If anyone from DO is reading, automated deployment and administration with Nixops is at the top of my wish list.

jolmg• 8 years ago

Though I haven't used DigitalOcean, I always thought it to be pretty equivalent to Linode, being a direct competitor and all. I'm kind of surprised this is a new feature for DO. I installed NixOS on a Linode server a couple years back, and Linode has no explicit support for it. Am I to understand that it was impossible to install custom OSes in DO before, or does this simply make it easier?

Bring Your Custom Image to DigitalOcean

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