Allow user to provide separate storage location for images through GUI

[Nick Niehoff]

On deployments with a large number of images, it may become desirable to be able to provide a separate storage location for images downloaded to the rack controller. This would allow the user to have a separate mount with dedicated storage. The ask would be for this to be configurable in the GUI and be officially supported through the upgrade process.

The unofficial workaround to accomplish this is to simply mount a separate device at either:

/var/snap/maas/common/maas/boot-resources for snaps

or

/var/lib/maas/boot-resources for packages

[Lee Trager (ltrager)]

We've had variants of this request for awhile. MAAS currently stores all images in Postgres and on the filesystem of each controller. On a region+rack images take up double the space and many users don't like having large files stored in Postgres. Since MAAS boots over HTTP we've also had a number of requests to allow MAAS to manage all images using a remote file server(S3 endpoint) and no store the images at all.

We need to get time scheduled on the roadmap for this and hash out all the details.

[Alberto Donato (ack)]

We plan to rework how images are stored this cycle

[Jerzy Husakowski (jhusakowski)]

Feature request is captured on the internal product feedback board (ref. PF-3227).