OpenStack Summit April 2013

We (as in OpenStack) want to allow users to build in various clouds, but in order to do this we need to provide image conversion tools (or organize existing tools to make it easier on users). We'd like to get a community consensus on a starting point for this. Key issues are:
- what formats to support
- what format(s) for transfer
- where the conversion will happen:
- offline (on user side) before upload
- in flight
- on download
- offline (on cloud side, background job)
- interactions with image caching, snapshots and backups
- where the code to do this should live
- in Glance
- in another service
- as a toolset
In addition to the image format problem, there's the additional problem of additional software (e.g., cloud init, Xen agent, drivers) necessary for good VM performance. We need some discussion on whether/how this can be injected into the image or what's the best way to do this.

(Session proposed by Alex Meade)