Ubuntu Fan Images

This week, Dustin Kirkland announced the Ubuntu Fan Project.

To steal from the description, “The Fan is not a software-defined network, and relies on neither distributed databases nor consensus protocols.  Rather, routes are calculated deterministically and traffic carries no additional overhead beyond routine IP tunneling.  Canonical engineers have already demonstrated The Fan operating at 5Gpbs between two Docker containers on separate hosts.”

My team at Canonical is responsible for the production of these images. Once the official SRU’s land, I anticipate that we will publish an official stream over at cloud-images.ubuntu.com. But until then, check back here for images and updates. As always, if you have feedback, please hop into #server on FreeNode or send email.

GCE Images

Images for GCE have been published to the “ubuntu-os-cloud-devel” project.

The Images are:

• daily-ubuntu-docker-lxd-1404-trusty-v20150620
• daily-ubuntu-docker-lxd-1504-vivid-v20150621

To launch an instance, you might run:
$ gcloud compute instances create \
    –image-project ubuntu-os-cloud-devel \
    –image <IMAGE> <NAME>

You need to make sure that IPIP traffic is enable:
$ gcloud compute firewall-rules create fan2 –allow 4 –source-ranges 10.0.0.0/8

Amazon AWS Images

The AWS images are HVM-only, AMD64 builds.

It is important to note that these images are only usable inside of a VPC. Newer AWS users are in VPC by default, but older users may need to create and update their VPC. For example:

$ ec2-authorize --cidr <CIDR_RANGE> --protocol 4 <SECURITY_GROUP>

About the author

Ben Howard is an open source and Linux engineer with experience in cloud technologies and large-scale systems engineering. Before joining Canonical, Ben worked for Amazon and Novell.