30–31 Aug 2025
St. Xavier's College
Asia/Kathmandu timezone

From ~60 minutes to ~5 minutes: Accelerating Launchpad Setup with LXD, LXD-Image-Builder and Cloud-Init

30 Aug 2025, 10:30
30m
1. Second hall (St. Xavier's College)

1. Second hall

St. Xavier's College

Maitighar, Kathmandu, Bagmati, 7437, Nepal
Talk Other

Speaker

Mr Tushar Gupta

Description

Have you ever wondered where the packages for multiple architectures on Ubuntu are built, where the primary archives are maintained and published, or where PPAs are hosted? If you've ever searched or filed a bug for Ubuntu, you may already know the answer—Launchpad. Launchpad is a set of web services that help software developers collaborate. Setting up Launchpad used to be a long, error-prone process, taking about 60 minutes with many manual steps, which made it difficult for the community to fix annoying bugs or propose new features.

In this talk, I'll demonstrate how we reduced the setup time to around 5 minutes using LXD, LXD-Image-Builder, cloud-Init, and LXD profiles. By pre-caching dependencies and automating the setup, the process is now faster, reliable, and makes it easier to contribute back. Join me to learn how these tools can simplify your workflow!

What audience can learn

LXD, LXD-Image-Builder to build custom reproducible LXD images and leveraging cloud-init to configure your containers at startup.

Biography

Tushar Gupta is a software engineer at Canonical, where he works on the Launchpad team, building the infrastructure that powers Ubuntu. Passionate about open-source, he actively contributes to Python projects and has worked on p5py (Processing for Python), Flagsmith (feature flag management), and Sarthi (Docker-based preview environments). He is also an alumnus of the MLH Fellowship, Processing Summer Fellowship, and the GitHub Campus Experts program.

Things to know or prepare for this session

Nothing special, but it will be good to know a bit about LXD, cloud-init

Summary

Setting up Launchpad used to take an hour with many manual steps. Now, it takes just 5 minutes using LXD, LXD-Image-Builder, cloud-init, and LXD profiles. Join me to learn how you can use these tools to simplify your workflow!

Difficulty level Begineer

Presentation materials