official-images VS multipass

Ubuntu now has snapshot.ubuntu.com, see https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-snapshots-on-azure-ensuring-p...

Related discussion about reproducible builds by the Docker people: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/issues/160...

> In their updated policy, it appears they now won't remove any existing images, but projects who don't pay up will not be able to publish any new images

This is not correct. It's the "organization" features are going away. That is the feature which lets you create teams, add other users to those teams, and grant teams access to push images and access private repositories. Multiple maintainers can still collaborate on publishing new images through use of access tokens which grant access to publish those images. It's kind of a hack, but it works. You would typically use these access tokens with automated CI tools anyway. This will require converting the organization account to a personal user (non-org) account. (Interesting note/disclosure: I was the engineer who first implemented the feature of converting a personal user account into an organization account some time around 2014/2015, but I no longer work there.)

For open source projects which are not part of the Docker Official Images (the "library" images [1]), they announced that such projects can apply to the Docker-Sponsored Open Source Program [2].

I would also heed the warning from the author of this article:

> Self-hosting a registry is not free, and it's more work than it sounds: it's a proper piece of infrastructure, and comes with all the obligations that implies, from monitoring to promptly applying security updates to load & disk-space management. Nobody (let alone tiny projects like these) wants this job.

Having most container images hosted by a handful of centralized registries has its problems, as noted, but so does an alternative scenario where multiple projects which decided to go self-hosted eventually lack the resources to continue doing so for their legacy users. Though, I suppose the nice thing about container images is that you can always pull and push them somewhere else to keep around indefinitely.

[1] https://hub.docker.com/u/library

Indeed. While I do maintain two of them, that maintenance is effectively equivalent to being an open source maintainer or open source contributor. I do not have any non-public knowledge about the Docker Official Images program. My interaction with the Docker Official Images program can be summed up as “my PRs to docker-library/official-images” (https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pulls/TimW...) and the #docker-library IRC channel on Libera.Chat.

"AdoptOpenJDK up until now was producing OpenJDK binaries with both Hotspot and OpenJ9 VM's. With Adopt's move to Eclipse, legal restrictions prevent the new Eclipse Adoptium group from producing/releasing OpenJ9 based binaries. As a result, IBM will be producing OpenJ9 based binaries in 2 flavours, Open and Certified, both under the family name IBM Semeru Runtimes. Essentially the same binaries, released under different licenses."

Source: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/10666...

They should be available soon, the corresponding PR at docker-library/official-images has already been merged: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/13693

Official image lists are added here: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/tree/master/library

Looks like this PR will release the official version to the hub: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/12382

We’ve also officially release containers for ppc64le available on all the major registries and we’ve also gone ahead and updated our containers to 8.5.4 and patched against the latest security updates where applicable. 18 packages have been updated and you can see that work here.

Install Multipass from https://multipass.run

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass I love Multipass for quick Ubuntu instances spun up for testing or as a playground. Wish I would have known and used of it sooner.

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

I would be cautious or even distrustful of using anything from Oracle. VirtualBox components come under three different licenses - GPLv2, personal use & evaluation license, and an enterprise license. Their VirtualBox license FAQ [1] gives them enough leeway to change future licenses at will. If an exploit is discovered in your old VirtualBox and they've changed the license, you're out of luck.

We've moved our development to KVM and Virtual Machine Manager on Linux [3] and UTM on Mac [4]. There are other options to run your VM, such as Multipass [5] or VirtualBuddy [6].

On a digressive topic - it was fun migrating our legacy application server stack from Oracle Java (old & poorly considered decision) to OpenJDK, thanks to their license [2].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[2] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...

[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor

[4] https://mac.getutm.app/

[5] https://multipass.run/

[6] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️