azure: add public mapping of series->Publisher:Offering:SKU

[Andrew Wilkins]

The mapping of series to Azure marketplace image is hard-coded into Juju. This works fine for Ubuntu, where we control the SKUs, but not so well for CentOS and Windows.

If a new Windows series comes along, we would currently have to create a new Juju release with the mapping for that series. It would be better if we could host a file somewhere public that maps series to Publisher:Offering:SKU. Like simplestreams, but stripped down and specific to Azure. Or maybe we should just generate simplestreams for the new Azure.

[Nate Finch (natefinch)]

We already need to update Juju for every new released windows version, due to the code here: https://github.com/juju/utils/blob/master/series/supportedseries.go#L128

So, while I agree that we should fix this, it seems like it shouldn't be critical, since Juju won't work without an update anyway.

[Bogdan Teleaga (bteleaga)]

But the problem here is slightly different. We already have support in Juju for 2016 server and nano and they can be used in MaaS or Openstack for example.

Using them on public clouds is a bit more tricky though. For AWS I remember we had to bypass the image stream signature check to be able to use windows AMI's and there was another bug opened to change that, allowing for custom signed image streams. The problem here is rather similar. Assume I want to use some windows image that is available in Azure's cloud, but I cannot use it since the SKU is not bundled inside the juju binary. Since we already use simplestreams for so many things, I don't see how adding it here would be that hard.

Moreover, the SKU's available on the clouds are prone to change while the code available in juju/utils is supposed to work regardless of the image. So, in the case of a cloud changing it's SKU juju would just be broken until we release a new version.

[James Tunnicliffe (dooferlad)]

For this bug, we can use the compute clients ListSkus call. We already do this for Ubuntu, so replicating it for other products seems reasonable.

[Andrew Wilkins (axwalk)]

James, that does not really help, because we don't control the mapping of series to SKU for Windows or CentOS. We (the QA/release team specifically) will be publishing simplestreams metadata for CentOS and Windows on Azure.

[James Tunnicliffe (dooferlad)]

Thanks Andrew, that is good to know. I didn't realise that the decision had been made to go ahead and publish Azure simplestreams data. I guess that means that azure will get something that looks a lot like ec2/image.go and lose the internal/imageutils stuff.

Please loop me in on the progress of publishing the data and, if you have some, provide some test data that I can use to make some progress on this.

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

FYI, as of a short time ago, the Windows and Centos simplestreams work has been delayed until the 16.10 timeframe.

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

@Curtis,
I was under the impression that Centos and Windows images were supported as off recently. There was some work done in London.
Is this still a valid bug?

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

Removing 2.1 milestone as we will not be addressing this issue in 2.1.

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

As this is a tech-debt item, I am lowering its Importance.

[Canonical Juju QA Bot (juju-qa-bot)]

This bug has not been updated in 5 years, so we're marking it Expired. If you believe this is incorrect, please update the status.