GoogleCloudPlatform/anthos-samples

Reduce Ansible installation time by bundling static steps into the VM image

Shabirmean opened this issue · 4 comments

Shabirmean commented

What?

As per the current state of the Ansible installation scripts the process takes ~35 minutes to complete. We can reduce this time by bundling some of the static steps in the Ansible scripts (that does not change with the host_vars) into a VM image.

This can make the quick start experience much better by reducing the time it takes to reach completion.

Notes:

  • Everything up to abm-install can be packaged into an image
  • The image needs to be available to both GCE and physical machines
  • Explore using Packer Qemu builder to create the images
  • We can try building the image for QEMU in GCP and converting it
Shabirmean commented

This is open following this issue which was created when the anthos-bm-edge-deployment sample was in the point-of-sale repo

mike-ensor commented

One comment on this, creating a Packer image is the preferred method, but there is indecision on who hosts the custom image. For example, is it a public and maintained image or should each customer builds the image locally and use their own. In the latter case, you aren't saving much time unless you wipe and reset the target frequently.

This is something that should be built to reduce the overall build-time and promote homogenous infrastructure, but will need a bit more emphasis in order to re-prioritize over other features

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