30.000 FAIme jobs created in 7 years

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 12:57:36 +0100
FAI.me

The number of FAIme jobs has reached 30.000. Yeah!
At the end of this November the FAIme web service for building customized ISOs turns 7 years old. It had reached 10.000 jobs in March 2021 and 20.000 jobs were reached in June 2023. A nice increase of the usage.

Here are some statistics for the jobs processed in 2024:

Type of jobs

3% | | cloud image
11% | | live ISO
86% | | install ISO

Distribution

2% | | bullseye
8% | | trixie
12% | | ubuntu 24.04

78%

bookworm

Misc

18% used a custom postinst script

11% provided their ssh pub key for passwordless root login

50% of the jobs didn't included a desktop environment at all, the others used GNOME, XFCE or KDE or the Ubuntu desktop the most.

The biggest ISO was a FAIme job which created a live ISO with a desktop and some additional packages This job took 30min to finish and the resulting ISO was 18G in size.

Execution Times

The cloud and live ISOs need more time for their creation because the FAIme server needs to unpack and install all packages. For the install ISO the packages are only downloaded. The amount of software packages also affects the build time. Every ISO is build in a VM on an old 6-core E5-1650 v2. Times given are calculated from the jobs of the past two weeks.

Job type | | Avg | | Max
install no desktop | | 1 min | | 2 min
install GNOME | | 2 min | | 5 min

The times for Ubuntu without and with desktop are one minute higher than those mentioned above.

Job type | | Avg | | Max
live no desktop | | 4 min | | 6 min
live GNOME | | 8 min | | 11 min

The times for cloud images are similar to live images.

A New Feature

For a few weeks now, the system has been showing the number of jobs ahead of you in the queue when you submit a job that cannot be processed immediately.

The Next Milestone

At the end of this years the FAI project will be 25 years old. If you have a success story of your FAI usage to share please post it to the linux-fai mailing list or send it to me. Do you know the FAI questionnaire ? A lot of reports are already available.

Here's an overview what happened in the past 20 years in the FAI project.

About FAIme

FAIme is the service for building your own customized ISO via a web interface. You can create an installation or live ISO or a cloud image. Several Debian releases can be selected and also Ubuntu server or Ubuntu desktop installation ISOs can be customized. Multiple options are available like selecting a desktop and the language, adding your own package list, choosing a partition layout, adding a user, choosing a backports kernel, adding a postinst script and some more.