My whole team is working feverishly on the final touches of Crowbar before we turn over the keys.  We’re putting it through a complete release cycle (extensive QA, customer pilots, documentation, etc) because internal Dell consumers are expecting that level of finish. 

For those in the community eagerly waiting to see the code, I hope you like the extra polish (for example: I18N, user & deployment guides, bundled continuous integration scripts, and months of testing).

RUMOR CONTROL NOTE: Crowbar is NOT limited to deployments on Dell products!!  Our BIOS and RAID barclamps are, of course, targeted and licensed for Dell customers.  The OpenStack and other barclamps will work on any gear that can run Chef Client.

Tonight I was working on the user guide and thought I would share the graphic and text describing how a barclamp gets deployed.

The figure shows the entire of a barclamp within the Crowbar user interface.  A Barclamp defines the capability for a service but cannot be deployed.  To deploy a barclamp, you must create a Proposal.  Once the proposal is created, you must selection nodes to operate on.  As discussed in the next sections, you may also edit the Proposal’s attributes as needed.  

Applying the Proposal tells Crowbar to deploy the proposal onto the nodes.  While deploying, nodes return to the Ready state when deployment is completed.  Once a proposal has become an Active Role, you cannot edit it.  You must delete the Role and repeat the Apply process