In this workshop, we will guide participants through the process of building Fedora Cloud Images using the powerful and versatile Kiwi image builder. Kiwi is an open-source tool that simplifies the creation of customized Linux images for various platforms, including the cloud.

During the session, we will cover the following topics:

Introduction to Kiwi Image Builder: We will provide an overview of the Kiwi tool, its features, and its role in building Fedora Cloud Images.

Setting Up the Environment: We will guide participants on setting up the necessary dependencies and configuring the environment for image building.

Image Customization: We will explore the different customization options available in Kiwi, such as package selection, configuration tweaks, and adding custom scripts.

Advanced Techniques: We will demonstrate advanced techniques for optimizing image size, enhancing security, and integrating with cloud platforms.

Testing and Deployment: We will discuss strategies for testing the built images and deploying them to popular cloud providers.

Are you a user of public cloud services or interested in leveraging the power of the cloud for your projects? Join us for an engaging and informative Public Cloud Users Meetup, where cloud enthusiasts and developers gather to share their experiences, best practices, and insights around architecture.

This Meetup is a community-driven event designed to bring together individuals and organizations who are using or considering public cloud services. This interactive meetup aims to foster knowledge exchange, networking, and collaboration among open source community users and developers of many different backgrounds.

Topics will include using Podman on individual cloud instances, container management across different infrastructure environments, cloud migration, and issues related to repatriation, and the use of kubernetes from desktop to combinations of hyperscalers

In recent times we saw a number of improvements to various image building tools. We have osbuild, kiwi-ng, mkosi, lorax, each one with different configuration philosophy and language, build mechanism, features and possible outputs. It's fairly easy to do a superficial comparison that looks at the configuration format and the list of features, but it's much harder to get a good feeling for the the implementation choices and details.

In this panel the developers from the different projects will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different projects, make comparisons, and answer questions from the audience.

Some important differences between the projects:
- an API for developers (or the lack thereof). Kiwi has it and it's considered important, mkosi does not.
- a human readable image description. Mkosi uses ini-files, Kiwi uses xml/json/yaml, OSBuild defines the distributions in code, Lorax uses kickstart…
- different output formats, support for signing, file systems.
- unprivileged operation with no device access (via systemd-repart)
- support in build "orchestrators" like koji or OBS. Koji recently gained support for Kiwi and OSBuild, but doesn't support mkosi.
- support for reproducible builds