Hi all,

Are there any plans to start using layered filesystems in Bosh, primarily
for the purpose of saving a lot of compilation?

Julian Friedman and Will Pragnell gave a cool talk at CF Summit Frankfurt
about using layered filesystems inside the CF staging process. Dr Nic, Alex
Ley and Julz had a conversation
<https://twitter.com/AlexEvade/status/781141821519003648> about what the
same approach would mean for Bosh, and after I spent last week on a crazy
endeavour to run all of cf-release on Bosh Lite in a single Docker
container, I can see merit in it.

There must be some huge potential gains in having each stemcell available
as a layered filesystem, and then compilation result in an image being push
to bosh.io or similar whenever a unique combination of stemcell/package is
compiled. That'd also drive out packages being well-known and addressable,
which is another area where the Bosh UX would benefit (how many times has
someone handcrafted an OpenJDK JRE package?).

Taking it further, could you even get a bit 12 Factor and start templating
jobs at start-up? That'd allow entire VMs to be imaged, as a result of
combining the images from all the compiled packages. Inject properties to
the agent at start-up, which does the templating, and then you can share VM
images but have properties in manifests diverge?

Regards,
Daniel Jones - CTO
+44 (0)79 8000 9153
@DanielJonesEB <https://twitter.com/DanielJonesEB>
*EngineerBetter* Ltd <http://www.engineerbetter.com> - UK Cloud Foundry
Specialists