Bring Your Custom Image to DigitalOcean | Hacker News Reader

Bring Your Custom Image to DigitalOcean

blog.digitalocean.com

98 pointsoedmarap47 comments

A neat feature, though it'd be really nice to get the sort-of opposite and be able to easily download our droplet snapshots or backups to be able to store or run locally as needed.

This is probably not possible because they want you to stay on their platform.

That would mean it is possible, just deliberately blocked.

Lots of hosts don't want to let you do that, so you can't port your images to other hosts.

That said you can use rsync to transfer the contents of a remote system to a local-snapshot if you wish. It won't cope with changes made during the run of the rsync, but if you coordinate you can migrate easily with this approach if you wish.

Actually I have used this method for cross-country migration of vms to a new datacenter. You have to exclude /dev and /proc at a minimum, then run rsync twice or more. Downtime was less than a minute, the time spent to reboot the vm and ensure it came up properly.

I've done it myself, and have the process pretty well memorized now. As you say if you want to rsync "/" you need to exclude /proc, /sys, & /dev.

Then on the new install you want to remove references to MAC address of any NIC that udev might have saved, update the hostname, IP, and similar static details.

Finally ensure that your bootloader is correct, and that you don't refer to outdated fileystem UIDs, by either updating them or using device-names instead.

This is great news for making use of OpenBSD and other non-native OS. Most hosting I've used doesn't support OpenBSD or any other *BSD.

Digital Ocean has supported FreeBSD for quite a while.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are different OSes though.

The point I was trying to make is that if DigitalOcean supports FreeBSD, it wouldn’t take much to support OpenBSD if they wanted to. I believe there’s a work-around where you can install OpenBSD on DigitalOcean using FreeBSD to bootstrap the process.

BSD is one of those things Ive heard of but know nothing about. What are the pros and cons of choosing BSD over something like Linux?

BSD has a great firewall, it's usually more integrated than Linux (for certain definitions of "integrated"), and some argue that it's more secure/stable. Some argue that the BSD license is superior. Hardware support and software availability tend to be more hit-or-miss. N.B.: I do not use BSD.

I run my web servers using FreeBSD on Digital Ocean.

Not to get into a whole thing about it, but Linux just refers to the kernel; various groups package the kernel with user-land stuff to create distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, etc.

FreeBSD is a unified operating system that’s developed, tested and released as a unit; they take responsibility for the entire stack and architectures: amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, armv6, and aarch64.

In general, FreeBSD (and to my knowledge, the other BSDs) are very stable, memory efficient, supports high throughput, and are quite secure. Famously I suppose, Netflix runs their entire infrastructure on FreeBSD and contributes back lots of code. The base of Apple’s macOS is a FreeBSD variant called Darwin.

The narrative has been that FreeBSD is fabulous for servers and the like but not as good for desktops and laptops, due to it not having as broad driver support for the latest PC hardware. My understanding that’s starting to change with BSDs specifically focused on desktop use; see https://trueos.org.

There’s a lot more; see https://www.freebsd.org/advocacy/whyusefreebsd.html

> FreeBSD is a unified operating system that’s developed, tested and released as a unit

When people mention this, it doesn't mean Linux ships with a kernel and everyone putting random things on top but Linux is also rigorously tested by distribution vendors and are well streamlined throughout, so I don't think that's much of a selling point for BSD.

What matters for average users are that they can google their problems easily and they don't get hit by edge cases that they can't easily solve.

None of the UNIX except macOS are really good at desktop.

For a historical perspective ... way back in the day there was Unix at Bell Labs, and one of it's licensed derivatives was made by Berkeley Systems, and hence their distribution was called BSD.

Unix split into 2 main variants, BSD and System 5 Unix. Most commercial derivations were based on System 5, and BSD was used in academia.

A short time later Linus created his own System 5 Unix-inspired OS kernel, Linux, but from clean cloth, and distributed it with userspace tools borrowed from yet another OS project called GNU created by Richard Stallman.

The various BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, etc) are descendants of the original BSD.

People used to say BSD and it's children were "real" Unix and Linux was not, though I don't think many care about that anymore.

I will say something that is completely incorrect as facts, but helpful as a thought technology:

Choosing BSD over Linux is like choosing Slackware over Elementary. The differences are there, but they're very niche and subtle in the technical side and the philosophical side.

If you've never used a BSD, you can safely think of it as just another linux distro, and use the same reasoning you'd use to choose your favorite distro.

Do you need more specifics on which are those differences? Check out [1] and my own take on [2].

[1] https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

[2] https://cfenollosa.com/blog/openbsd-from-a-veteran-linux-use...

One word, Dtrace https://wiki.freebsd.org/DTrace

Well OpenBSD tends to attract OS minimalists. I went to the bother of learning OBSD when I started to get the impression that Linux might be headed towards some sort of complexity crisis. Initially simple servers were the target but I now have a desktop and a laptop on it as well.

Practically I don't really see BSD better, as Linux is more widely used in commercial spaces which means more readily available packages, more edge cases solved, more results on Google and more jobs.

But if you want to be educational and use the OS which invented OpenSSH, pf (firewall that is far easier to read than iptables) and many other useful tools, then you might want to give a go at OpenBSD. It's fun to run it as your home router.

If you want to try zfs without being awkward due to licensing concern and thus cannot be distributed from Linux vendors directly, then FreeBSD is a good choice. NetBSD, I never tried but code seems clean to support quite a range of hardware platforms. DragonflyBSD, is more like a research OS to innovate on new features.

It seems to be limited to ext3/4... don’t think it’d be possible to get a native obsd install going on thse.

And yet, they list bsd-cloudinit, Which is far as I can see is completely a FreeBSD thing, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret that list.

https://openbsd.amsterdam

Not affiliated

Why only ext3/4 filesystems? Why not XFS?

They likely need to be able to mount your filesystem for some of their features to work. That's how they can reset your root password, write out network configs, etc etc.

Network configs are written out via cloud-init last I checked, hence the requirements on one of the variants.

Also: You must add an SSH key when creating a Droplets from a custom image. These Droplets have password authentication disabled by default and it’s not possible to use the control panel to generate or reset the root password.

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/custom-images/overv...

Oh that's so lame. I wanted to run something exotic like BeOS or Plan 9. PoorMan in BeOS was the first public webserver I ever ran! Followed shortly by IIS on Windows 2k... Which should also be an option.

Vultr also offers this, and has for years. https://www.vultr.com/features/uploadiso/

Though I haven't used DigitalOcean, I always thought it to be pretty equivalent to Linode, being a direct competitor and all. I'm kind of surprised this is a new feature for DO. I installed NixOS on a Linode server a couple years back, and Linode has no explicit support for it. Am I to understand that it was impossible to install custom OSes in DO before, or does this simply make it easier?

Using regular Linux tools you are even able to bootstrap Windows on Digital Ocean (or any kvm vps): https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Windows_7_Installer_on_KVM_Li...

This could be done without custom images. Now it will be easier.

Excellent. This should mean no more instability with DigitalOcean as a deploy target for NixOps.

Faaaaantastic. I've been bootstrapping Alpine on top of Debian for a while now.

I wonder if this is compatible with unikernals like MirageOS? https://mirage.io

> Any Linux OS that supports ext3/4 file systems and has cloudinit 0.7.7, cloudbase-init, coreos-cloudinit, ignition, or bsd-cloudinit

So my guess is no.

If anyone from DO is reading, automated deployment and administration with Nixops is at the top of my wish list.

Can we share custom images with others?

i remember DO has been promising to deliver custom image since like more than 5 years ago.

glad to see it finally happens

aren’t they like, 6 years old?

5yrs < 6yrs

Founded June 24, 2011; 7 years ago

I don't really see how this is newsworthy... I've been purchasing virtualization and cloud services from a variety of smaller providers for years -- without fail, all of them are more than happy to provision custom images. My current provider, Reprise Hosting, accepts custom images without extra fees and without caveats to their SLA.

It's a blog announcing a new feature for their platform. It's not like they are taking an ad out on the New York times.

You can still advertise without taking an ad out in the New York Times, and this post is clearly advertising.

Its their own blog. I think its ok to be writing about every feature they build on the blog even if its a simple feature.

Yes. The question is if it should be on HN or not.

I don't use Digital Ocean currently, but I have before and like to know what they're up to.

If not many people find it interesting it won't stay on the front page for long anyway.

If it should be on HN is entirely dependant on users who vote, so i guess it's interesting to people.

Nvidia announces new graphics cards. Should it be on HN?

Apple announces new iPhone, listing specs. Should it be on HN?

Google announces new service. Should it be on HN?

In general, if it's something tech related that the community finds interesting, I don't see why not.

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