Cockpit as 1:1 system management system

cockpit-01.md

Cockpit as 1:1 System Management Solution for ALP

Content moved to https://github.com/ancorgs/alp-system-management/blob/main/cockpit.md

zz_add_host.png

zz_kdump.png

zz_logs.png

zz_ntp.png

zz_yast2-kdump.png

Is the ALP Host OS supposed to be an immutable transactional system?
Yes. /etc and /var are read write, the rest with exceptions read-only. Exceptions are this parts, which neither cockpit nor YaST should ever touch: /usr/local, /opt, /srv, /home, ...
They could be read-write, but must not.

Managing Multiple Systems from a Single Cockpit Interface
To my knowledge this is dead upstream and functionality got removed.

How much of each cockpit extension could be somehow containerized?
If possible everything, this makes everybody lifes easier. No idea how far this is possible. But with the availability of the busybox BCI container image, we should at least put the web stuff back into the container.

would the Host OS include python3
We try to avoid that as much as possible, but for some functionality (like todays firewalld), this is not possible. That's why tools with this dependencies on SLE Micro are not installed by default and/or we are looking for ways to put them into a container.

Is there any expectation of being able to use Cockpit (or any similar tool) to configure also some aspects of the so-called workloads
I would love to see that, but this would have to be done on per-workload basis. However, having a way to extend the management system by custom plug-ins sounds like a fair requirement for the future.

Will the ALP configuration be split following the cascade approach we are adopting in Tumbleweed?
ALP will be based on TW; in order to have image-based update supported at some point of time I don't think that there is a way around that (unless you want to think of a completely new approach).

On transactional system: Currently cockpit on Micro works thanks to the fact that it does not need to write outside the writable directories (/etc/,...).
For updates, there is a transactional-update plugin being developed, but it has not yet been released for Micro 5.2 - should happen as a maintenance update.

Managing Multiple Systems from a Single Cockpit Interface
The focus - independently on upstream development - should be on 1:1 (pet) management. There are better ways for mass-management.