Virtual Machine Image Guide name misleading

[Adrien Cunin]

I find that the "Virtual Machine Image Guide" name is misleading, because it mentions "virtual machine" while the potential reader might still be stuggling to understand the differences between a legacy VM infrastructure and a cloud infrastructure such as OpenStack.

These /images/ we are talking about are used to create *instances* which might be virtual machines as well as bare metal machines.

What about "Cloud Image Guide" or simply "Image Guide"?

The intent of this bug report is to get some feedback on the idea before proposing a patch.

[Lana (loquacity)]

I'm not a fan of renaming it at this stage, mostly because the purpose of the guide is fairly well explained at the beginning of the book, and if you've gotten to the point where you require the contents of this book, there's a fair chance you're not confused by this terminology any more. Happy to argue the point, though.

If enough people are concerned about the naming of this guide, then it should be brought up in release planning, so that it can be changed in an orderly manner as part of the next release. I'm happy to discuss this during Liberty planning in Vancouver, if people wish.

[Adrien Cunin (adri2000)]

Yes I'd be happy to talk more about this topic. Do you know if there is / will be a session at Vancouver where we could take a few minutes to discuss this? It sure does not require its own session...

[Salehi (salehi)]

I agree Lana's opinion,
and I think the "Cloud ready images guide" will be an appropriate description.

"Virtual Machine Image Guide" is only about Virtualization and "Cloud Image Guide" may be conveys that "a fully Cloud Image" which contains of every thing in itself!

Thats why I'm thinking "Cloud ready images guide" will be an appropriate combination of words.

[Bernd Bausch (berndbausch)]

The term "virtual machine images" has the advantage of being quite specific, and, as Adrien points out, the disadvantage of simply being wrong. The term "cloud images guide" sounds a bit vague and unspecific. "cloud ready images guide" is better.
Does the word "guide" has to come at the end, or do we need this word at all?
Here is my mouthful: "Creating and managing images for your OpenStack cloud"

[Anne Gentle (annegentle)]

Just to give some history and context, the Virtual Machines Image Guide came into being in the Havana release, July 2013 or so. Here's the mailing list post with the titles it sat next to: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-docs/2013-July/002391.html

- OpenStack Installation Guide

 - OpenStack Configuration Guide

- Block Storage Service Administration Guide

 - Compute Administration Guide (contains Identity and Images)

 - Networking Administration Guide

 - Object Storage Administration Guide

 - End User Guide

 - Admin User Guide

 - Operations Guide

 - High Availability Guide

 - Security Guide

 - Virtual Machine Image Guide

 - API Quick Start

 - API Complete Reference

 - Block Storage Service API v2 Reference

 - Compute API v2 and Extensions Reference

 - Identity Service API v2.0 Reference

 - Networking API v2.0 Reference

 - Image Service API v2 Reference

 - Image Service API v1 Reference

 - Object Storage API v1 Reference

 - Programming Compute API with Shell and Python, 1st ed.

You can see we have been consolidating since. We have also avoided the use of gerund forms of verbs in titles in accordance with the IBM Style Guide.