Need a way to provide a simplestream for "custom images"

[Jeff Lane ]

MAAS 1.7 provides a workable means for importing custom images into MAAS for things like CentOS, SuSE and even our Certification images that are based on Ubuntu ISOs.

However it occurrs to me that that's a lot of work, I imagine:

1: We will have to maintain those images somewhere (CentOS, SuSE, and we will maintain our certification images)
2: We will have to distribute those images. Currently Cert is storing them in the same place we store offline tarballs for testing, but they're stored in a simple web location and must be fetched via wget or browser.
3: MAAS already has a very easy mechanism for grabbing new images in the form of simplestreams.

SO it would be really useful, I think, if maas could import custom images from simplestreams as well.

Then I could set up a "certification stream" that my team would own and maintain, containing "Official Canonical Certification Images".

These would be multiple images from the same LTS (e.g. 14.04GA, 14.04.1, 14.04.2, 14.04.4, etc)

MAAS would discover new images via simplestreams and download the latest. MAAS would then automatically inject that image as a new "Custom Image" so it will appear in the list of custom images for users to access.

That way, We could have a situation where a tester at an OEM/ODM has a MAAS server with 14.04.1 and 14.04.2 custom Certification images for testing, and once 14.04.3 is released, a new "Custom" image would appear in the user's "Custom Images" list on their MAAS server once the server pings the stream, sees the new image, and downloads it.

This is a feature request that I think will enhance the usability for custom images.

Assuming there's also an easy way to point the user's MAAS server at multiple custom streams, they could be encouraged to grab images from various sources for various needs (an ONIE stream, an Ubuntu Stream, a Certification Stream, a Custom OS Stream, an internal stream that the OEM maintains).

That last is a value-add bonus though.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

When you go through closing bugs as "Fix Released" could you please link the bug to the merge that fixed the bug, or at least add comments pointing to info on the fix that resolves it?