flatcar
Include the Installable Image in the Live CD
We would love to see the inclusion of the install-able Flatcar image with the Live CD. Fedora CoreOS is moving in this direction and it would allow trivial offline installs of FlatCar in environments without access to the internet.
I second this. I tried to setup a proof of concept flatcar cluster today at work. I work in healthcare and there are some organizational features that make it difficult to navigate the political layer to setup any sort of automation or modern development practices that access the internet.
My experience today was hampered by the online requirement of the installer. Instead of showing a working environment and say "See, the computers can update themselves, and that makes it way more secure than our provision and forget VM approach" I have to have the conversation around why I need them to allow the *.release.flatcar-linux.net domains allowed through, which then leads to questions about why I am not clicking the update button manually on all these computers and etc, etc.
Having a offline option would have allowed me to setup the cluster and prove out it's worth much faster.
I think it's possible to embed the installation image into the LiveCD together with an Ignition config that starts the installation. It's just a matter of doing it, documenting the steps and assembling a nice script for it. We also have a proof-of-concept for offline updates but it wasn't really a priority; I recommend reaching out to https://kinvolk.io/contact-us/ if you have resources to sponsor this work.
Offline updates are available with the new flatcar-update tool.
While we have docs for customizing the release images: https://www.flatcar.org/docs/latest/installing/customizing-the-image/customize-the-image/ we don't have a section there yet for the Live CD customization to embed the to-be-installed-image and the Ignition config to do so on the Live CD's OEM partition.