What is the difference between images alpine/3.10 and alpine/3.10/cloud?

1

What is the difference between images alpine/3.10 and alpine/3.10/cloud?
They seem to be almost identical. Apart from the image dates, they seem to have a slightly different version in /etc/alpine-release.apk-new:
alpine/3.10: 3.10.2
alpine/3.10/:cloud: 3.10.1

2

The cloud variant has cloud-init installed in it.

3

That would be lovely, but does it work yet? How?
I created this profile for creating a user, which works with ubuntu, but not with alpine/3.10/cloud:

config:
  user.user-data: |
    #cloud-config
    users:
      - name: votsalo
        ssh_authorized_keys:
          - ssh-rsa test votsalo@example

description: creates votsalo user
name: votsalo
used_by: []

I used it as follows:
lxc launch ubuntu:18.04 u1 -p default -p votsalo
lxc launch images:alpine/3.10/cloud a1 -p default -p votsalo

container u1 has user “votsalo”, as specified in cloud-init
container a1 has no such user. Also tried with images:alpine/edge/cloud

My pet peeve with alpine is that I cannot create a passwordless user easily. I manually assign a dummy random password which I never use, in order to ssh with RSA key.

4

@monstermunchkin do you know how to use cloud-init with the alpine image?

5

It likes there is no official cloud-init package in Alpine yet.
In fact, there is a cloud-init package in edge only.

See here,
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=cloud-init&branch=edge

1 Like
6

Indeed, those images were produced but aren’t functional, I’ll go ahead and manually wipe them from the image server (we already stopped building them a while ago).

7

I’m really wondering where did you find alpine/3.10/cloud image. I need it but for some reason it’s not available on images.linuxcontainers.org. Could anyone help please?

8

Just above @stgraber said that those /cloud Alpine images have been removed because currently Alpine does not package cloud-init.

There would be an Alpine container image for LXC/LXD as long as the distribution ends up packaging cloud-init.

Currently, the latest stable Alpine 3.11 does not have the cloud-init package, https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=cloud-init&branch=v3.11

The edge Alpine has cloud-init, https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=cloud-init&branch=edge
which means that Alpine 3.12 is likely to have the package.

I suppose you could file a request at https://github.com/lxc/distrobuilder/issues to get a /cloud for Alpine edge.

9

We don’t provide a cloud image for Alpine 3.12 because the cloud-init package is in the testing repository. Once the package is moved to a non-testing repo we will consider providing a cloud image.

In the meantime, you can create your own Alpine cloud image using distrobuilder.

10

Be great if someone can answer this for 3.19 of Alpine.

Thanks.

11

The answer hasn’t changed.

12

This is cloud-init in Alpine 3.19. The package is in the community repository of Alpine and not in the main repository.

13

Thanks!

14

Thanks for clearing this up.