Hacker News Reader

Comment by losnggenration | Hacker News Reader

I think it's called OVF[1]. It's just not as widely supported as it probably should be.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format

Yeah, just try using OVF with containers and you'll discover how much of a round peg/square hole fit you are describing. VM's and containers are surprisingly different.

> Wouldn't it be cool if projects like Packer[1] didn't have to exist, because the image format of Virtual Machines was open and documented as an independent standard?

Is what I should have quoted in my reply. Nobody was talking about using one instead of the other. Though, it'd be easy enough to run, for instance, CoreOS from an OVF image to run containers from. Though, I feel like you and I are just stating the obvious at this point. Wouldn't you agree?

I would.

Yes, it is always massively disappointing with every release of Parallels Desktop for Mac that OVFs and OVAs are not supported; they blindly continue to support just their own disk format whilst pushing their "enterprise" solution - surely OVF and OVA deployments are essential in that environment???

Sigh!

This'll be the last version of Parallels that I buy (thanks Yosemite)

In theory, OVF is the 'answer' for Virtual Machines -- but its failure has been in adoption -- if you can't get Amazon and OpenStack to adopt it, what's the point?

Before Rocket/ACI there wasn't even a contender for Containers. Now there is a published spec. Start there. Iterate.

I don't disagree, but OVF is an ANSI[1] & ISO[2] standard. Like you said, Amazon & OpenStack have chosen not to adopt it.

[1] http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=INCITS+469-20...

[2] http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_det...

Just goes to show that adopted+working is more important and useful than a published spec.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com