Technical requirements for templates

For templates launching on the Exoscale marketplace, the following requirements need to be fulfilled:

Required

  • QCow2 image for KVM
  • 1 network interface with public IP
  • Checksum
  • Password reset / Credential reset feature compatible
  • No display required for initial setup

Preferred

  • 10 GB initial disk size
  • Autogrow disk size
  • Cloud-Init support for contextualization
  • Push or pull continuous image build from vendor. Packer recipe.

Updating regime for templates

The template maintainer is responsible for updating templates and ensures to offer only up-to-date and high-quality templates to Exoscale users.

Minor updates, especially security updates, need to be automatically integrated in the template. Another way to implement minor updates is to register a new template to replace the old version for running machines. In any case, outdated, corrupted or defective templates will be removed from general availability by Exoscale.

Major updates or product relates updates are under the discretion of the template maintainer. If there is a new release of your product, you register a new template on the Exoscale marketplace complementing the old version. In most cases we advise to keep one product page for these 2 versions and highlight the available releases available as templates.

When your product has reached “end of life” we will inform Exoscale users about the upcoming deprovisioning or your template. After a reasonable grace period machines running the outdated template will be stopped.

Packaging for release

Provide a link to download the template image from an http(s) source along with a image.yaml file with the following content:

  • family: the image distribution, for example Debian. The correct field is provided by Exoscale on the initial push and needs to stay consistent for the full lifetime of the template.
  • version: the image variant, for example 9 (Stretch) for debian stretch
  • name: the image name in Exoscale, for example Linux Debian 9 64-bit
  • username: the default username for the template.
  • password: false if the template doesn’t support password authentication (optional, default true).
  • uefi: true if the template boot using UEFI (optional, default false).
  • size: the template will be resized to this size in bytes (optional, default 10737418240).
  • sshkeyenabled: true if the template supports providing an SSH key at deploy time (optional, default false).
  • image: name of the qcow2 image (optional).
  • source: base URL location for the template. The full link will be source + image
  • checksum: md5 checksum of the image.