What’s one-apps?

The new one-apps tools bring together our contextualization repos (addon-context-linux and addon-context-windows) with a series of scripts for building ‘vanilla’ OS images and appliances for your OpenNebula cloud. We have made these internal tools public in order to share with the whole Community the methods that we use for creating images and appliances for OpenNebula. Our goal is to make it easier for users to create ready-to-use marketplace appliances that come with built-in contextualization packages. These packages are designed to configure the VM guest operating systems automatically. By doing so, we aim to make the image-building process more transparent and encourage the Community to get involved by contributing fixes and reporting issues.

How to start building appliances

We use Hashicorp Packer, a popular open source tool, for all our image-building scripts. The full list of software requirements can be found here. To make things easier for users, we’ve provided a Makefile that can be run for specific images or appliances. This approach simplifies the process of building images, supporting a wide range of operating systems, including the latest versions like Debian 12 and Alpine 3.18. Please take a look at the list of all current target distros here! 🤗

The OpenNebula MarketPlace

If you want to build images and appliances for OpenNebula you don’t require the OpenNebula Marketplace, one-apps is a standalone set of tools. This means that you can set up and run your private marketplaces using a Simple OpenNebula Marketplace.

Benefits of building appliances with one-apps

By defining a standardized approach to building images and integrating them with OpenNebula’s contextualization, one-apps simplifies the process of creating and managing virtual appliances. We’ve even made the source code for key appliances like the Virtual Router and OneKE public. This openness allows users to customize, rebuild, and use these appliances without depending solely on the OpenNebula Marketplace.

How to contribute

We’d very much like to see users getting involved in this initiative by creating issues and submitting pull-requests with fixes for existing images and appliances. Your contributions help us to improve OpenNebula and can benefit the entire Community, so don’t be shy!

Webinar on one-apps

In case you missed it, we recently showcased one-apps in our webinar series. This session provided a comprehensive look at creating context packages and marketplace appliances, covering everything from generating context packages to their application in OpenNebula instances. If you want to see the one-apps tools in action, go ahead and watch the recorded session here.