OpenStack Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes December 6, 2011
Posted by Rob H in Citrix, Dell, Greg Althaus, HP, Matt Ray, Meetup, OpenStack, Opscode, RackSpace.Tags: cactus, Dell, Diablo, essex, HP, Keystone, kvm, lts, meetup, Nova, OpenStack, OpsCode, quantum, Seattle, ubuntu, xen
6 comments
We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.
This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg and I), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.
We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build. Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!). We need Keystone support. Anyone up for that?
Highlights
There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.
- After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
- The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
- There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
- Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level. The Quantum Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.
- HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
- We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
- Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).
Note: cross posted on the OpenStack Blog.
Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!
Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.
Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts! We’ll also open the floor to other OpenStack topics that would be discussed – open technical and business discussions – no commercials please!
We’ll also talk about organizing future OpenStack meet ups! If your company is interested in sponsoring a future meetup, find Joseph George at the meetup and he can work with you on details.
Opscode Summit Recap – taking Chef & DevOps to a whole new level December 4, 2011
Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, DevOps, Greg Althaus, Opscode.Tags: Chef, couchdb, Crowbar, DevOps, erlang, open space, OpsCode, orchestration, Wiki
4 comments
Opscode Summit Agenda created by open space
I have to say that last week’s Opscode Community Summit was one of the most productive summits that I have attended. Their use of the open-space meeting format proved to be highly effective for a team of motivated people to self-organize and talk about critical topics. I especially like the agenda negations (see picture for an agenda snapshot) because everyone worked to adjust session times and locations based on what else other sessions being offered. Of course, is also helped to have an unbelievable level of Chef expertise on tap.
Overall
Overall, I found the summit to be a very valuable two days; consequently, I feel some need to pay it forward with some a good summary. Part of the goal was for the community to document their sessions on the event wiki (which I have done).
The roadmap sessions were of particular interest to me. In short, Chef is converging the code bases of their three products (hosted, private and open). The primary change on this will moving from CouchBD to a SQL based DB and moving away the API calls away from Merb/Ruby to Erlang. They are also improving search so that we can make more fine-tuned requests that perform better and return less extraneous data.
I had a lot of great conversations. Some of the companies represented included: Monster, Oracle, HP, DTO, Opscode (of course), InfoChimps, Reactor8, and Rackspace. There were many others – overall >100 people attended!
Crowbar & Chef
Greg Althaus and I attended for Dell with a Crowbar specific agenda so my notes reflect the fact that I spent 80% of my time on sessions related to features we need and explaining what we have done with Chef.
Observations related to Crowbar’s use of Chef
- There is a class of “orchestration” products that have similar objectives as Crowbar. Ones that I remember are Cluster Chef, Run Deck, Domino
- Crowbar uses Chef in a way that is different than users who have a single application to deploy. We use roles and databags to store configuration that other users inject into their recipes. This is dues to the fact that we are trying to create generic recipes that can be applied to many installations.
- Our heavy use of roles enables something of a cookbook service pattern. We found that this was confusing to many chef users who rely on the UI and knife. It works for us because all of these interactions are automated by Crowbar.
- We picked up some smart security ideas that we’ll incorporate into future versions.
Managed Nodes / External Entities
Our primary focus was creating an “External Entity” or “Managed Node” model. Matt Ray prefers the term “managed node” so I’ll defer to that name for now. This model is needed for Crowbar to manage system components that cannot run an agent such as a network switch, blade chassis, IP power distribution unit (PDU), and a SAN array. The concept for a managed node is that that there is an instance of the chef-client agent that can act as a delegate for the external entity. I had so much to say about that part of the session, I’m posting it as its own topic shortly.
Greg Althaus at 11/15 Austin Cloud User Group meeting (annotated 90 min audio) November 18, 2011
Posted by Rob H in CloudOps, Crowbar, Crowbar, Greg Althaus, Joseph George, Meetup, Video.Tags: ACUG, cloud, Crowbar, Dell, Greg Althaus, OpenStack
add a comment
Greg Althaus did a 90 minute Crowbar deep dive at this week’s Austin Cloud User Group. Brad Knowles recorded audio and posted it so I thought I’d share the link and my annotations. There are a lot more times to catch up with our team at Dell in Austin, Boston, and Seattle.
Video Annotations - (##:## time stamp)
- 00:00 Intros & Meeting Management
- 12:00 Joseph George Introduction / Sponsorship
- 16:00 Greg Starts – why Crowbar
- 19:00 DevOps slides
- 21:00 What does Crowbar do for DevOps
- make it easier to manage
- make it easier to repeat
- 24:00 What’s included – how we grow / where to start
- 27:20 Starting to show crowbar – what’s included as barclamps
- pluggable / configuration
- Barclamps!
- 28:10 What is a barclamp
- discussion about the barclamps in the base
- 34:30: We <3 Chef. Puppet vs Chef
- 36:00 Why barclamps are more than cookbooks
- 36:30 State machine & transitions
- Q&A Section
- 38:50 Reference Architectures
- 43:00 Barclamps work outside of Crowbar?
- 44:15 Hardware models supported
- 47:30 Storage Queston
- 49:00 HA progress
- 53:00 Ceph as a distributed cloud on all nodes
- 56:20 Deployer has a map of how to give out roles
- 58:00 Demo Fails
- 58:30 Crowbar Architecture
- 62:00 How Crowbar can be extended
- 63:00 Workflow & Proposals
- 65:40 Meta Barclamps
- 71:10 Chef Environments
- 73:40 Taking OpenStack releases and Environments
- 75:00 The case for remove recipes
- 77:33 Git Hub Tour
- 79:00 Network Barclamp deep dive
- 84:00 Adding switch config (roadmap topic)
- 86:30 Conduits
- 87:40 Barclamp Extensions / Services
- 89:00 Questions
- 89:20 Proposal operations
- 93:30 OpenStack Readiness & Crowbar Design Approach
- 93:10 Network Teaming
- 94:30 Which OS & Hypervisors
- 96:30 Continuous Integration & Tools
- 98:40 BDD (“cucumberesque”) & Testing
- 99:40 Build approach & barclamp construction
- 100:00 Wrap up by Joseph
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.Tags: Andi Abes, Austin, Boston, Crowbar, Greg Althaus, LISA, meetup, OpenStack, OpsCode, Seattle
2 comments
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:
-
Online:
- Dell Tech Chat about Crowbar 11/8 @ 3pm CST with Rob Hirschfeld. I’ll be fielding questions about everything Crowbar, OpenStack, and Hadoop. (missed it? transcript online)
- Crowbar Listserv is always open (and lately very active)
- Dell Tech Chat about Crowbar 11/8 @ 3pm CST with Rob Hirschfeld. I’ll be fielding questions about everything Crowbar, OpenStack, and Hadoop. (missed it? transcript online)
-
Austin:
- Austin Cloud User Group 11/15 – Crowbar Deep Dive featuring Greg Althaus.
- Austin OpenStack Meetup 12/8 @ Tech Ranch Austin
-
Boston:
- Boston OpenStack Meetup 11/29
-
Opscode Birds of a Feature session at LISA 12/6 7pm will be attended by Andi Abes so you can pepper him with questions about Crowbar+Chef Integrations.
-
Seattle:
- Opcode Community Summit 11/29-30. Greg and Rob are attending. We’re thinking about a Crowbar session (for attendees) and a non-summit informal evening drinks downtown on 11/30.
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 |
OpenStack: Five Challenges & Conference Observations October 27, 2011
Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, Greg Althaus, Michael Cote, OpenStack, OpenStack Design Summit.Tags: api, Continuous Integration, Cote, Dell, Design Conference, Greg Althaus, OpenStack
add a comment
I was part of the Dell contingent at the OpenStack design conference earlier in the month. The conference opened a new chapter for the project because the number of contributing companies reached critical mass. That means that the core committers are no longer employed by just one or two entities; instead, there are more moneyed interests rubbing elbows and figuring out how to collaborate.
From my perspective (from interview with @Cote ), this changed the tone of the conference from more future looking to pragmatic.
That does not mean that everything is sunshine and rainbows for OpenStack clouds, there are real issues to be resolved. IMHO, the top issues for OpenStack are:
- API implementation vs specification
- Building up coverage on continuous integration
- Ensuring that we can deploy consistently in multi-node systems
- Getting contributions from new members
- Figuring out which projects are code, satellite, missing or junk.
Of these issues, I’ve been reconsidering my position favoring API via Implementation over specification (past position). This has been a subject of debate on my team at Dell and I like Greg Althaus’ succinct articulation of the problem with implementation driven API: “it is not fair.” This also ends up being a branding issues for OpenStack because governance needs to figure out which is a “real” OpenStack cloud deployment that can use the brand. Does it have to be 100% of the source? What about extensions? What if it uses the API with an alternate implementation?
Of the other issues, most are related to maturity. I think #2 needs pressure by and commitment from the larger players (Dell very much included). Crowbar and the deployment blueprint is our answer #3. Shouting the “don’t fork it up” chorus from the roof tops addresses contributions while #5 will require some strong governance and inevitably create some hurt feelings.
Austin OpenStack Cloud Meetup: Thursday 10/27 6:30 PM at TechRanch Austin October 21, 2011
Posted by Rob H in Crowbar, Greg Althaus, Joseph George, Meetup, OpenStack.Tags: Crowbar, Dell, meetup, OpenStack, rackspace, TechRanch
add a comment
OpenStack Enthusiasts, you are OFFICIALLY INVITED to Austin’s first post-Diablo OpenStack community event.
Dell is sponsoring an Austin OpenStack Meet Up help connect the Austin community around OpenStack and open source clouds!
Link: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/37908242/
We’ve got members of the Rackspace Cloud Builders Training team in town and Dell’s own Crowbar team attending. We’re planning to do OpenStack demos and talk about the project in detail – and we’ll have plenty of pizza and sodas to keep the cloud juices flowing.
This is a great way to learn about the OpenStack cloud project and meet other people who are developing/deploying the hottest open source cloud around.
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD – we’re trying to make this inaugural OpenStack meetup a big success!
See you there,
OpenStack Hardware Sessions Slides & Updates to “Bootstrapping Hyperscale Clouds” October 6, 2011
Posted by Rob H in CloudOps, Greg Althaus, OpenStack Design Summit.2 comments
Disclaimer: I work for Dell and we make very fine cloud optimized hardware. This presentation is NOT slanted towards Dell hardware, it simply reflects lessons learned from listening to our customers. Of course, people buying Dell servers, networking and storage products pays my salary and WE LOVE OUR CLOUD CUSTOMERS!
This presentation OpenStack Hardware Oct 2011 was the outline for our revisiting of the hyperscale white paper from last fall. I’m in the process of updating this to reflect lessons learned.
Here are some highlights:
- Fault zones are not as critical as expected – customers are putting in more redundancy instead of striping apps
- 10 GbE is more popular than expected
- Logically segmented redundant networking (teamed) is more popular than physical isolate
- Customers are starting small (AnyScale instead of HyperScale)
Shout, chat and whisper with Dell at OpenStack Design Summit & Conference September 30, 2011
Posted by Rob H in Barton George, Crowbar, Greg Althaus, Joseph George, OpenStack, OpenStack Design Summit.Tags: Blueprint, Boston, Crowbar, Design Summit, Diablo, Keynote, OpenStack
2 comments
My team at Dell has been very (very) busy delivering a lot of great materials for the Fall 2011 OpenStack Design Summit & Conference in Boston MA next week.
Our motto for this conference is “DOING IS DOING” or, perhaps, “DIABLO IS DOING.”
You can count on Dell to be walking the walk with deliverables that advance OpenStack. In fact, you can watch what we’re doing because it’s posted live as we work with the community to build it.
First, we’ll have our Crowbar demo rack showcasing LIVE MULTI-NODE DIABLO DEPLOYMENTS and some IMPORTANT FEATURE AND COMMUNITY ADDITIONS. No spoilers here – you’ll have to come by. Of course, it’s in the git hub too, but we’ve put a bow on it.
Second, there’s a DEPLOYMENT BLUE PRINT discussion about getting better interlocks between OpenStack development and deployment. We really need to reduce the pain and lag between adding great features and using those features.
Next, we’ve got a limited audience CONCEPT SNEAK PEEK for something from our labs that we think is very interesting and we’d like to get input about. Unfortunately, we’re very limited with space & time for this whisper session so you’ll need to contact OpenStack@Dell.com to request an invitation.
Finally, at the Conference, you can see OUR TEAM IN ACTION:
- Thurs 11:30 – Dell Keynote by John Igoe
- Thurs 3:30 – Private Cloud Panel w/ Rob Hirschfeld
- Thurs 4:30 – Hardware Infrastructure w/ Rob Hirschfeld & Greg Althaus
- Friday 11:00 – Deployments w/ Greg Althaus
- Friday 3:15 – Crowbar!! w/ Scott Jensen (yes, he does it with the !!)
- Friday 4:15 – KVM & OpenStack
More conference posts: JB Gorge & Barton George.
