Objective Review: Fedora Linux is widely available in cloud providers and CI services

We’re working on Fedora Strategy 2028 — our next five-year plan. We are now reviewing those Objectives and their associated Impact. Read this guide for details on the current planning phase.

This Objective is part of the Theme “Fedora is for everyone” and the Focus Area Reaching the World. For general discussion of this focus area, please see the topic Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Reaching the World).

Objective and Impact

Objective: Fedora Linux is widely available in cloud providers and CI services.
Impact: Fedora is perceived as the default developer platform.

Fedora Cloud Edition and Fedora CoreOS are available as launchable images in Amazon’s AWS and Google’s GCP. However, we don’t always have the most recent editions available in AWS Marketplace — right now, that’s showing F34, which has a clear impact on use:

If we were more consistent with this, and had more Fedora Linux variants in more providers, it’d be an easier choice for many people — particularly those building cloud-based services.

Additionally, many CI services — used for automatically testing code — don’t provide a Fedora Linux option. Since that’s such an important service, that can slant a whole project towards writing for whatever is available. If our distro were available more places, that would increase our appeal to the developers of such projects, who we then hope will be drawn to help improve the thing they’re building on.

Our goal now

For this Objective and related Impact, validate that:

  1. If the Impact is achieved, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in active Fedora contributors.
  2. Success in the Objective logically results in the intended Impact.
  3. That link is reasonably sufficient — that is, it represents everything needed to have the Impact.
  4. While there might be other ways to have similar Impact, the chosen Objective is the right one for Fedora right now.
  5. The wording is precise and clear. The Objective is concrete, and the Impact is (at least a little bit) inspirational. Together, they fit into this Focus Area.

Bonus. If you can improve the longer explanatory paragraphs at the top of this post, that’s helpful too!

As outlined in the roadmap, this post will close in one month.

This is perhaps the most important objective in the “Reading the World” focus area. It’s also the most difficult. Ubuntu didn’t rise because it was technically superior, but because it became the default for third-party demos, CI, instructions, etc. And that is a virtuous cycle: the more ubiquitous you are, the more ground you gain.

I think there’s a missing element, though. Simply being available in cloud providers and CI services won’t get us to being the default developer platform. It’s necessary, but insufficient. We’ll also need active developer advocacy to get those third-party applications using Fedora Linux (and to help with packaging, etc, etc).

This might be best included in the “Activities” column, so I may be too far to the left on the logic model right now. But I don’t want us to lose sight of the fact that we need to do more than just be available in order to achieve the impact we want.

Yeah, I agree, and I think it might be important to have it actually called out here rather than just in the specifics. This actually helps me feel confident about keeping it separate from the available-on-hardware one, because for that one, availability is its own success metric (because if it’s not selling, it’ll be dropped).

Do you have a suggestion for rewording the Objective?

I agree. These are distinct enough to warrant their own objective/impact statements.

Alas! Everything that comes to mind is either an impact or an activity. I’m going to go for a walk around the neighborhood in a few minutes. If any ideas spring forth, I’ll let you know.

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We could consider instructors and content creators to be extended ecosystem of cloud providers.

Well-known e-learning platform such as Coursera, coding bootcamp, Udemy, and LinkedIn learning amplify developer advocacy towards particular Linux OSs. Vast majority of cloud developer certification courses use Ubuntu when spinning up VMs as part of tutorials and walk-throughs.

We could also differentiate comms plan for educators and e-learning platform providers why Fedora cloud/server is the ultimate choice for cloud development and potentially a bridge to RHEL family products in corporate world.

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I think @hankuoffroad is on to something here. Tied to the “reaching the world” focus area, there is a growing number of developers coming into the Open Source ecosystem all over the world. I am about to give a presentation on an alumni panel at my alma mater where I point at the GitHub State of the Octoverse report, which mentions there are now 94+ million developers on GitHub (doubled from 44 million in 2019) and over 3.5 billion contributions[1] on GitHub.

Getting our platform out and in front of people in learning platforms and with a developer advocacy lens might even be more important than getting our platform into cloud providers and CI. I don’t have a nice way of wording this into an objective though. I need more time to process it.


  1. commits, issues, pull requests, discussions, gists, pushes, and pull requests reviews ↩︎

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