When the Fedora Board (the precursor to the current Fedora Council) set up the three-edition strategy for Fedora, we chose three broad areas, and asked interested people in our contributor community to develop focused editions aimed at a target in each area. These were server, desktop, and emerging computing — resulting in Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud Base Image.

Looking at the Fedora Cloud Base Image

Fedora Cloud Base Image is pretty great — it’s a minimal-footprint Fedora with cloud-init which you can use as the base for building your own application infrastructure in Amazon AWS EC2, Digitial Ocean, OpenStack, or other open source cloud environments. But, it didn’t really catch on. We’d hoped that SCLs would provide plugable software stacks on top of the fast-moving base, so you could target your app at a more-stable API while still getting advantage of the fast-moving base OS. But, for various reasons, that didn’t really happen, and the users didn’t really come.

Meanwhile, the container revolution kicked off — and, really, it promises what we were hoping for all along: you can have your fast-moving base and move your software stack at a different pace. So, for Fedora 25, we switched the edition to Fedora Atomic Host.

Where is Fedora Cloud?

That’s awesome, but not everyone is ready for the new container world  — they just need that minimal OS to build on. So, we didn’t stop making it. But…. we didn’t have a new home for it, so you had to know where to download or search for it. That’s changed now — check out the beautiful new cloud.fedoraproject.org launch page.

Thanks to Dusty Mabe and especially Robert Mayr for working on this!