Building a best practices platform is essential to helping companies share operations knowledge.   In the fast-moving world of open source software, sharing documentation about what to do is not sufficient.  We must share the how to do it also because the operations process is tightly coupled to achieving ongoing success.

Further, since change is constant, we need to change our definition of “stability” to reflect a much more iterative and fluid environment.

Baseline testing is an essential part of this platform. It enables customers to ensure not only fast time to value, but the tests are consistently conforming with industry best practices, even as the system is upgraded and migrates towards a continuous deployment infrastructure.

The details are too long for a single post so I’m going to explore this as three distinct topics over the next two weeks.

1. Reference Deployments talks about needed an automated way to repeat configuration between sites.
2. Ops Validation using Development Tests talks about having a way to verify that everyone uses a common reference platform
3. Shared Open Operatons / DevOps (pending) talks about putting reference deployment and common validation together to create a true open operations practice.

OpenStack, Hadoop, Ceph, Docker and other open source projects are changing the landscape for information technology. Customers seeking to become successful with these evolving platforms must look beyond the software bits, and consider both the culture and operations.  The culture is critical because interacting with the open source projects community (directly or through a proxy) can help ensure success using the software. Operations are critical because open source projects expect the community to help find and resolve issues. This results in more robust and capable products. Consequently, users of open source software must operate in a more fluid environment.

My team at Dell saw this need as we navigated the early days of OpenStack.  The Crowbar project started because we saw that the community needed a platform that could adapt and evolve with the open source projects that our advanced customers were implementing. Our ability to deliver an open operations platform enables the community to collaborate, and to skip over routine details to refocus on shared best practices.

My recent focus on the OpenStack DefCore work reinforces these original goals.  Using tests to help provide a common baseline is a concrete, open and referenceable way to promote interoperability.  I hope that this in turn drives a dialog around best practices and shared operations because those help mature the community.