Continuing the discussion from Notes from a drupal meetup:
One route might be to get Plone support into Softaculous/Fantastico/Installatron. http://alternativeto.net/software/softaculous/
If I'm recalling correctly (@svx, please correct me here) we have the capabilities to build the installers needed by most hosting companies. It's a matter of needing more volunteer time from the Plone community to compile and distribute those, as well as some lobbying to get the hosts to accept them.
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We can try but I suspect its a bit of a chicken abd egg thing. Hosters won't be that interested if they don't see demand and users might not be interested if its not easy to host. I guess we need go work out what's the most likely path a new user would take to get it hosted that we can support well.
Do others agree a good production docker with instructions for aws abd others fits that?
Need to think abiut ease of adding addons, upgrades, hosting costs etc.
RPMs, RPMs, RPMs 
Sorry but I had this request twice this year.
And we said: NO
Just because there is nothing easier than git cloning a buildout and running the standard buildout process.
-aj
Forget Docker for Plone deployments. If you have an issue with your buildout configuration then the whole buildout step including the download of hundreds of packages repeats over and over again. This is a major pain.
The only way round here is using a two-step approach with a naked Docker image containing only a bare Plone installation and using this as base image for a Plone buildout with out real production environment. This is all hard to maintain, very error prone and time consuming. Docker makes things here more complicated, unpredictable and fragile.
-aj
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Seems to me an easier alternative is to set up our own "inexpensive" Plone hosting service, something that @bledwell and I already do on the side. We don't advertise it but maybe we should, huh.
It won't get the same visibility as getting it onto, say, GoDaddy, but it's also something we can do without an uphill battle convincing an external party.
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Hosters aren't in the picture here. Hosters choose e.g. Fantastico. They don't choose Plone, they've never heard of Plone, they don't care about Plone (or about 90% of the other packages that are handled by Fantastico). But because Fantastico now knows how to install Plone, any of their users can just click the Plone button and try it out.
I'd say in this case it would be lobbying to get one or more of http://alternativeto.net/software/softaculous/ to accept an install script (i.e. not lobbying the hosts). The host accepts e.g. Fantastico, and with that they accept all the software that Fantastico is able to install.
IIRC, what svenx was working on was the ability to generate VM images for multiple cloud hosts.
Sorry for the late delay, I am currently swamped with work.
Yes,
@esteele and @smcmahon are right, I wrote a 'proof of concept' and it was working for various cloud hosts, like:
- Amazon EC2 (AMI)
- Azure Resource Manager
- DigitalOcean
- Google Compute Engine
- Null
- OpenStack
- Parallels
- QEMU
- VirtualBox
- VMware
- Custom
you can also build vagrant boxes and more, if you want.
I never got around to finish it, basically it would be one week work to have it working and with good docs, tests and nice written code a bit more it is based on https://www.packer.io/ and ansible.
And since we are on it, we have some updates about docker. As you may know we have https://github.com/plone/plone.docker which is partly based on https://github.com/eea/eea.docker.plone and partly on other input.
The idea is to follow best practices of plone and docker which is not always that easy if you try to combine these two .
Before we put that on plone.org or into the docs, there still needs some work to be done, this is mostly finishing/writing the docs and fixing some issues with the images.
In order to get that done there we are discussing the idea to have a small sprint.
We tried to keep the images as general as possible, like there are based on the UI-Installer, no fancy or custom buildout.
The idea behind that is, that they should be ' easy and usable' so they are not as small as possible, they come with compilers and so on.
I'm pretty sure we'd also have no problem supporting Linode via their StackScripts mechanism.
Hi there!
And to keep this post fresh I would like to add to what @svx described, that we have a PR by Alin
for the official plone image pending review by docker
It is very devops friendly!
The above will work on all hosting providers that have adopted a container-based software as a service approach, most are adding containers deployments these days.
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