Introducing ProjectRaindrops, a service that will build disk images for you ready to be used in your favourite cloud or virtualised environment.

One of the key barriers to entry into a cloud or virtualised environment : setting up and maintaining a piece of infrastructure that builds disk images. Its also a colossal waste of time and involves needing a complete instance of the environment one is going to deploy the image in. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that allowed you to drop in a kickstart file, write up a config to go with that kickstart and just build the image for you ?

Now there is. Its called ProjectRaindrops and its live, in beta mode, at http://projectraindrops.net/ ; As an initial kick off we are doing builds for HVM ( ie. any fully virtualised environment, be it KVM, Xen, VirtualBox or VMware ); With more HyperVisors and more disk formats coming soon.

Getting started is easy, goto the Raindrops website; sign in using either github or twitter credentials ( we don't store any personal details, but if your account does not have an email address, we won't be able to send out email notifications ). There are two key components:

• A config file: that contains metadata about what you want the build to do
• A kickstart file: that has the actual details on what the build should contain

Example pre-populated templates are available, just click on the new button and the template will be injected in. And there is some validation rules that track the config and kickstart file, so if you make mistakes or lose format validation, you will find out right away. And we have versioning for each file built in too. Finally, there is no real correlation between a config file and a kickstart file, when you create a new job you can pick an arbitrary kickstart and any config file in your account to match it with.

So, now that you have a config and a kickstart file, click on new job, give it a name, select which config you want to use and what kickstart file, click on 'Submit' and in a few minutes your build should be done. You can even track the job as it works its way through various stages.

Lots of interesting things in planning and development stages, stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks. For now, go ahead and drop in on http://projectraindrops.net/ and give it a shot. Just consider it to be a Beta release, so send us lots of feedback.

- KB