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Hadoop Crowbar released to open source! (plus AN HOUR of videos!) November 29, 2011

Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, Crowbar, Dell, Hadoop, Hadoop, Open source, Uncategorized, Video.
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I’m proud to announce that my team at Dell has open sourced our Apache Hadoop barclamps!  This release follows our Dell | Cloudera Hadoop Solution open source commitment from Hadoop World earlier this month.

As part of this release, we’ve created nearly AN HOUR of video content showing the Hadoop Barclamps in action, installing Crowbar (on CentOS), building Crowbar ISOs in the cloud and specialized developer focused builds.

If you want to talk to the Crowbar team.  We’re attending events in Boston 11/29, Seattle 11/30, and Austin 12/8.

Here are links to the videos:

More Hadoop perspectives from Dell:  Joseph George on what it means and  Barton George‘s backgrounder about barclamps.
(more…)

Seattle meetup on 11/30 (will bring massive laptops for OpenStack, Hadoop & Crowbar demos) November 22, 2011

Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, Greg Althaus, Hadoop, Meetup, OpenStack, Opscode.
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After Greg Althaus and I are done attending the sold out Opcode Community Summit (11/29-30), Opscode has offered to let us have an informal meetup at Opscode HQ from 6:30 to 8pm on 11/30.  I’ve proposed this as an official Seattle OpenStack Meetup (waiting on confirmation from @heckj).

We’re not limiting the agenda to OpenStack!  We’ll happily talk about Hadoop, Crowbar, Opscode or any other cloud technology that’s on your mind.  For 90 minutes, we’re offering Cloud Geeking as a Service (CGaaS).

Not in Seattle?  Never fear!  You can hook up with other members of my team at Dell in Boston on 11/29 & Austin 12/8.

Dell is open sourcing Crowbar Apache Hadoop barclamps! November 8, 2011

Posted by Rob H in Barton George, Crowbar, Hadoop, Hadoop, Joseph George, Open source, Video.
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I’m very excited to announce that my team at Dell will be open sourcing our Apache Hadoop Crowbar barclamps by the end of the month.

This release raises the bar on open Hadoop deployments by making them faster, scalable, more integrated and repeatable.

These barclamps were developed in conjunction with our licensed Dell | Cloudera Solution. The licensed solution is for customers seeking large scale and professionally supported big data solutions. The purpose of the open barclamps (which pull the open source parts from the Cloudera distro) is to help you get started with Hadoop and reduce your learning curve. Our team invested significant testing effort in ensuring that these barclamps work smoothly because they are the foundational layer of our for-pay Hadoop solution.

Included in the Hadoop barclamp suite are Hadoop Map Reduce, Hive, Pig, ZooKeeper and Sqoop running on RHEL 5.7. These barclamps cover the core parts of the Hadoop suite. Like other Crowbar deployments (see OpenStack), the barclamps automatically discover the service configurations and interoperate. One of our team members (call him Scott Jensen) said it very simply “I can deploy a fully an integrated Hadoop cluster in a few hours. That friggin’ rocks!” I just can’t put it more eloquently than that!

I’ll post again when we flip the “open” bit and invite our community to dig in and help us continue to set the standards on open Hadoop deployments.

For more perspectives on this release, check out posts by Barton George (just for devs), Joseph George (About Hadoop) and Aurelian Dumitru

Barton posted these two videos of me talking about the release too:

Hadoop & Crowbar:

Dev’s Only Short:

Talk with Team Crowbar! Online 11/8, Austin 11/15, Boston 11/29 & 11/29 & Seattle 11/30 November 7, 2011

Posted by Rob H in Andi Abes, Dell, Greg Althaus, Hadoop, Meetup, Open source, OpenStack, Opscode.
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My team at Dell has been getting a great response from our community about Crowbar. Thanks! We’re actively working a rock solid OpenStack deployment that will raise the bar on ease of deploy and drive operational excellence.

We have also heard that we need to improve access to the team; consequently, I’m delighted to announce a long list of places and dates where you can access us online AND in person.

Here’s the list:

Or in a calendar view:

Sun Mon Tuesday Wed Thursday Fri Sat
11/8 Online
Crowbar Chat
11/15 Austin
Cloud User
11/29 Boston
OpenStack Meetup		 11/30 Seattle
Crowbar Drinks TBD
12/6 Boston
Opscode BoaF		 12/8 Austin
OpenStack Meetup

Dell Crowbar Project: Open Source Cloud Deployer expands into the Community October 18, 2011

Posted by Rob H in CloudFoundry, Crowbar, Hadoop, Open source, OpenStack, Opscode, RackSpace, VMware.
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Note: Cross posted on Dell Tech Center Blogs.

Background: Crowbar is an open source cloud deployment framework originally developed by Dell to support our OpenStack and Hadoop powered solutions.  Recently, it’s scope has increased to include a DevOps operations model and other deployments for additional cloud applications.

It’s only been a matter of months since we open sourced the Dell Crowbar Project at OSCON in June 2011; however, the progress and response to the project has been over whelming.  Crowbar is transforming into a community tool that is hardware, operating system, and application agnostic.  With that in mind, it’s time for me to provide a recap of Crowbar for those just learning about the project.

Crowbar started out simply as an installer for the “Dell OpenStack™-Powered Cloud Solution” with the objective of deploying a cloud from unboxed servers to a completely functioning system in under four hours.  That meant doing all the BIOS, RAID, Operations services (DNS, NTP, DHCP, etc.), networking, O/S installs and system configuration required creating a complete cloud infrastructure.  It was a big job, but one that we’d been piecing together on earlier cloud installation projects.  A key part of the project involved collaborating with Opscode Chef Server on the many system configuration tasks.  Ultimately, we met and exceeded the target with a complete OpenStack install in less than two hours.

In the process of delivering Crowbar as an installer, we realized that Chef, and tools like it, were part of a larger cloud movement known as DevOps.

The DevOps approach to deployment builds up systems in a layered model rather than using packaged images.  This layered model means that parts of the system are relatively independent and highly flexible.  Users can choose which components of the system they want to deploy and where to place those components.  For example, Crowbar deploys Nagios by default, but users can disable that component in favor of their own monitoring system.  It also allows for new components to identify that Nagios is available and automatically register themselves as clients and setup application specific profiles.  In this way, Crowbar’s use of a DevOps layered deployment model provides flexibility for BOTH modularized and integrated cloud deployments.

We believe that operations that embrace layered deployments are essential for success because they allow our customers to respond to the accelerating pace of change.  We call this model for cloud data centers “CloudOps.”

Based on the flexibility of Crowbar, our team decided to use it as the deployment model for our Apache™ Hadoop™ project (“Dell | Apache Hadoop Solution”).  While a good fit, adding Hadoop required expanding Crowbar in several critical ways.

  1. We had to make major changes in our installation and build processes to accommodate multi-operating system support (RHEL 5.6 and Ubuntu 10.10 as of Oct 2011).
  2. We introduced a modularization concept that we call “barclamps” that package individual layers of the deployment infrastructure.  These barclamps reach from the lowest system levels (IPMI, BIOS, and RAID) to the highest (OpenStack and Hadoop).

Barclamps are a very significant architecture pattern for Crowbar:

  1. They allow other applications to plug into the framework and leverage other barclamps in the solution.  For example, VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and Dream Host has created a Ceph barclamp.  Both barclamps are examples of applications that can leverage Crowbar for a repeatable and predictable cloud deployment.
  2. They are independent modules with their own life cycle.  Each one has its own code repository and can be imported into a live system after initial deployment.  This allows customers to expand and manage their system after initial deployment.
  3. They have many components such as Chef Cookbooks, custom UI for configuration, dependency graphs, and even localization support.
  4. They offer services that other barclamps can consume.  The Network barclamp delivers many essential services for bootstrapping clouds including IP allocation, NIC teaming, and node VLAN configuration.
  5. They can provide extensible logic to evaluate a system and make deployment recommendations.  So far, no barclamps have implemented more than the most basic proposals; however, they have the potential for much richer analysis.

Making these changes was a substantial investment by Dell, but it greatly expands the community’s ability to participate in Crowbar development.  We believe these changes were essential to our team’s core values of open and collaborative development.

Most recently, our team moved Crowbar development into the open.  This change was reflected in our work on OpenStack Diablo (+ Keystone and Dashboard) with contributions by Opscode and Rackspace Cloud Builders.  Rather than work internally and push updates at milestones, we are now coding directly from the Crowbar repositories on Github.  It is important to note that for licensing reasons, Dell has not open sourced the optional BIOS and RAID barclamps.  This level of openness better positions us to collaborate with the crowbar community.

For a young project, we’re very proud of the progress that we’ve made with Crowbar.  We are starting a new chapter that brings new challenges such as expanding community involvement, roadmap transparency, and growing Dell support capabilities.  You will also begin to see optional barclamps that interact with proprietary and licensed hardware and software.  All of these changes are part of growing Crowbar in framework that can support a vibrant and rich ecosystem.

We are doing everything we can to make it easy to become part of the Crowbar community.  Please join our mailing list, download the open source code or ISO, create a barclamp, and make your voice heard.  Since Dell is funding the core development on this project, contacting your Dell salesperson and telling them how much you appreciate our efforts goes a long way too.

So you want to create a Crowbar barclamp? Here’s what you have to know… September 19, 2011

Posted by Rob H in CloudFoundry, Crowbar, Hadoop, OpenStack, Opscode.
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My team at Dell has created many barclamps to support OpenStack and Hadoop. One major objective of our recent modularization refactoring was to make it easier to the community to contribute barclamps. The Crowbar CloudOps approach is to build up a full cloud deployment using layers. So each barclamp represents a component of the overall deployment.

Note 9/21: Added Video Post showing the steps below.

A barclamp is a deployment module that is imported from its own code repository into the Crowbar framework. A barclamp cannot operate without Crowbar, but you do not have to create a unique build of Crowbar in order to create a barclamp.

The first thing to know about barclamps is that most of the work (80%!) is building your Chef cookbooks. If you don’t have a cookbook that deploys your application then stop here and work on that first.

The second thing to know about barclamps is that there are a lot of them that you can study for examples. Check out the Glance barclamp if you have a single server deployment, Nagios if you have a service that needs to be integrated into every node, Nova if you have a complex multi-component system and Provisioner if you want to impact core Crowbar functionality.

We’ve done a lot of work to make it easy to create and install a stub barclamp. Our experience is that building a barclamp is a highly iterative exercise with a lot of testing. Luckily, Crowbar’s primary mission is to help you brush, rinse and repeat. From there, you can customize and extend your barclamp to deploy your application’s full untamed glory.

Before you try to create a new barclamp, you must install Crowbar.

Creating a barclamp

The following steps use the barclamp_model that included under /dell/opt and is described below.

  1. Figure out the name of your barclamp. I’m naming our example “foo barclamp”
    1. Barclamps must have unique names.
    2. Do not use spaces or hyphens.
  2. From the Crowbar server, become the super admin: sudo -i
  3. Create a directory for your barclamp: mkdir /barclamps
  4. Run the barclamp create script: /opt/dell/bin/barclamp_create.rb foo “Zehicle” /barclamps
    1. “foo” is our barclamp name [required]
    2. “Zehicle” is my company name for the copyright information [default is Dell]
    3. “/barclamps” is the path where we are putting the barclamp [default is /opt/dell/barclamps]
    4. Result will be a populated barclamp. In this example: /barclamps/foo

That’s it! If you want to plan ahead then you could use an initialized git repo as the target.

Reminder: In building your barclamp, you’ll need to learn about Chef, how Crowbar extends cookbooks and how barclamps interact. That’s beyond the scope of this post.

Importing a barclamp

Once you created a barclamp, you can import the barclamp into Crowbar & Chef.

Assuming that you already created the foo barclamp in /barclamps, here are the steps:

  1. From the Crowbar server, become the super admin: sudo –i
  2. Run the barclamp install script: /opt/dell/bin/barclamp_install /barclamps/foo
    1. “/barclamps/foo” is the path to your barclamp. If could be anything!
    2. The core barclamps are in /opt/dell/barclamps.
    3. In a vm, you could mount a shared folder to access the barclamp (e.g.: /mnt/hgfs/barclamps)

Your barclamp should now show up in the Crowbar UI! You can also see it in Chef under the Crowbar databag.

While barclamps are generally safe to install multiple times, you can uninstall a barclamp using “barclamp_uninstall.rb /path/to/barclamp”

Barclamp layout

A barclamp has the following core components:

  • crowbar.yml configuration file (documented below)
  • README.txt file (optional, recommended)
  • chef directory containing
    • Cookbooks directory with Chef cookbooks
    • Data_bags directory with Crowbar configuration files
    • Roles directory with Chef roles used by the cookbooks and data_bags
  • crowbar_framework directory
    • app directory with Crowbar model, controller, and view code
    • other optional directories to add components needed by the UI such as images

The barclamp_model has a functional layout that covers most configuration requirements. The string ==BC-MODEL== indicates places where the name of the barclamp must be substituted. It is critical to understand that the name of the barclamp is embedded into the barclamp path and file names! This is needed to avoid file collisions when the barclamp is imported.

Crowbar.yml

The crowbar.yml file is a required configuration file that gives direction to the installer. The file has the following components:

barclamp:
  name: name of your barclamp (required, do not use space or hyphens) 
  display: pretty name of your barclamp [optional for now]
  description: information about your barclamp your barclamp [optional for now]
  version: what you want to consider for versioning [optiona] 
crowbar:
  layout: 1 (use the # one. This is required because it tells the installer what to expect inside your barclamp)
  order: 1000 (if installing multiple barclamps in one pass, order tells the installer the, well, order) 
nav: (remove the nav section, advanced users only) 
locale_additions: (you must add UI localizations here if you have any custom UI components) 
  en: (entries in this file map directly to entries in the config/locales/en.yml file and are added during install)

Crowbar modularized: latest changes that make clouds even easier to create, update, and maintain September 19, 2011

Posted by Rob H in CloudOps, Crowbar, DevOps, Hadoop, Migration, OpenStack, Opscode, RackSpace.
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8 comments

In the last week, my team at Dell completed a major refactoring of Crowbar that significantly improves our ability to bring in community contributions and field customizations.  Today, we merged it into Crowbar’s public repo(s).

From the very first versions, our objective for Crowbar was to create the fastest and most reliable cloud deployments. Along the way, we realized Crowbar’s true potential lay in embracing DevOps as an operational model for maintaining clouds. That meant building up cloud deployments in layers from pieces that we call barclamps (extensions of Chef cookbooks). Our first version, centered on OpenStack Cactus, leveraged barclamps but was still created as a single system. This unified system was a huge step forward in cloud deployments, but did not live up to our CloudOps vision of continuous delivery.

In this version, each Crowbar barclamp is an independent delivery unit that can be integrated before, while or after installing Crowbar.

The core of the change is each barclamp, including the most core ones, are stored in independent code repositories. Putting the code into distinct repos means that each barclamp can have its own life cycle, its own maintainer site and its own dependency tree. This modularization allows customers to manage their Crowbar deployments with a very fine brush: they may choose to customize parts of the system, they could lock components to specific tag and they can bring in barclamps from other vendors.

While the core barclamps are automatically integrated into the Crowbar build using git submodules; other barclamps are installed into the system as needed. This allows you to pull in the suite of OpenStack barclamps at build time or to wait until your Crowbar system is running before installing. Once you install a barclamp, you are able to retrieve an updated barclamp and reapply it to the system.

This feature gives you the ability to 1) choose exactly what you want to include and 2) perform field updates to a live Crowbar system.

Let’s look at some examples:

  1. The Cloud Foundry barclamp can be sourced Cloud Foundry instead of bundled into the Crowbar repository. This allows the team working on the cloud application to take ownership for their own deployment. As a continuous delivery proponent, I believe strongly that the development team should be responsible for ensuring that their code is deployable (refer to my OpenStack “Deployer API” blue print attempting to codify this).
  2. DreamHost, maintainers of Ceph Storage, can maintain their own local barclamp repos for OpenStack that are cloned from our community Swift barclamp. This allows them to innovate and customize OpenStack deployments for their business and choose which updates to merge back to the community.
  3. Rackspace Cloud Builders can work on the most leading edge OpenStack features and maintaining workable deployments on branches. As the code stabilizes, they simply merge in their changes.
  4. Dell BIOS and RAID barclamps only support the PowerEdge C line today. When we offer PowerEdge R support, you will be able to install or update the barclamps to add that capability. If another hardware vendor creates a barclamp for their hardware then you can install that into your existing system.

I believe that these changes to Crowbar are a huge step forwards on our journey of creating a community supportable Open Operations framework. I hope that you are as excited as I am about these changes.

I encourage you to take the first step by trying out Crowbar and, ultimately, writing your own barclamps.

Post Scripts:

  • In addition to the modularization, the updated code includes RHEL as a deployment platform. At present, you must choose to be either RHEL or Ubuntu at build time.
  • We have enhanced the network barclamp to describe connections as more abstract connections, called conduits, between nodes. This is a powerful change, but requires some understanding before you start making changes.
  • We have only begun testing the change as of 9/12, we expect the system to be fully stabilized by 10/3. If you are not willing to deal with bugs then I recommend building the Crowbar “v1.0″ tag (or using the ISOs from our July launch).

Cloudcast interview with Dell Cloud Solutions Team (quotes with time stamps) August 22, 2011

Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, Dave McCrory, DevOps, Hadoop, Joseph George, Open source, OpenStack.
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Lloyds BarbershopTheCloudcast.net – Thank you for such a great series of questions. Wow, nearly 36+ minutes of cloudicious interview about the work my team at Dell is doing!

Thanks to our hosts for putting together a great series! They are:

Highlights from Episode 16: Dell, Dude you’re getting a cloud

  • 3:40 JBG “we are listening to our customers tell us what they want to accomplish”
  • 4:40 RAH “humility is part of [what we're] doing … cloud is about learning and collaboration”
  • 6:40 RAH “OpenStack filled a niche. It was the first open source community cloud. … Not just open source, its open community.”
  • 7:15 RAH “We’re beyond critical mass. We’re seeing acceleration… we are transitioning into a community development.”
  • 7:30 RAH “It’s accelerating. It happening so fast.”
  • 8:00 RAH “We felt it was really important for people to be able to use it. We felt that it was important to get away from just people developing into people using. “
  • 8:57 – RAH “Cloud is not just one thing. You have to have all the pieces.”
  • 10: 15 – RAH “Cloud is always ready, never finished”
  • 10:50 – RAH “OpenStack is an alternative to public cloud including hosting providers seeking to offer their own cloud”
  • 12:40 – AD “Dell has been in the Big data space for many years now”
  • 20:15 – JBG “There’s a legacy of great partnerships that we leverage”
  • 20:48 – JBG “Conflicts have not come up because we are focused on the customer”
  • 21:30 – RAH “Shout out to Greg Althaus for solving these problems in such an elegant way. And we rewrote it 3 times”
  • 22:02 – RAH “Crowbar started from our frustration of bringing up a cloud quickly … so we took a DevOps approach.”
  • 22:41 – RAH “You had to have a system view AND a boot strapping view simultaneously”
  • 23:50 – JBG “Crowbar was born out of necessity because we were setting up and blowing away our clouds over and over and over again. “
  • 24:40 – JBG “We realized there were not many people thinking about all the pieces before OpenStack was installed”
  • 25:20 – RAH “We don’t think customers have all the answers before we show up. This is not unique to OpenStack.”
  • 28:20 – JBG “We’re seeing the community pick up Crowbar as a way to deploy”

Big Questions? Big Answers with Dell BigData solution (plus Crowbar gets RHEL) August 4, 2011

Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, Hadoop, Linux, Open source.
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In my enthusiasm for all things Dell + OpenStack, I have neglected to talk about my team’s interesting Big Data work with Apache Hadoop.  Hadoop is a suite of open source projects for analyzing large data sets of unstructured data.  Initially, Hadoop centered around use of the map-reduce algorithm; however, it’s grown way beyond that as the community has worked to solve problems related to data storage, discovery, and scheduling.

Big Data clouds are well suited to my team because the model (non-redundant/cloud) and scale (hyper) of their deployments.  It should be no surprise that builders of analysis clouds have the same goals (maximizing operational ROI per compute unit) as builders of other types of clouds.

Our Hadoop solution relies on the same core principles (CloudOps) and technologies (Crowbar) as our OpenStack solution.  Like our other cloud solutions, we are working closely with a proven leader: Cloudera.  Now that we’ve formally announced our solution and partnership, I can talk a about what we’re doing on the Big Data front.

One extra thing that I’m proud to announce, we’ll be adding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) support to Crowbar to support our Hadoop solution.  This support is not just at the node level: we are making Crowbar admin run on either platform too!  This is significant for two reasons:

  1. It expands the number of platforms and support options for Crowbar users
  2. It provides the framework to support more varieties of node operating environment (e.g.: XenServer, BSD, DRDOS, etc)

For more information, check out:

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