Since my earliest days on the OpenStack project, I’ve wanted to break the cycle on black box operations with open ops. With the rise of community driven DevOps platforms like Opscode Chef and Puppetlabs, we’ve reached a point where it’s both practical and imperative to share operational practices in the form of code and tooling.

Being open and collaborating are not the same thing.

It’s a huge win that we can compare OpenStack cookbooks. The real victory comes when multiple deployments use the same trunk instead of forking.

This has been an objective I’ve helped drive for OpenStack (with Matt Ray) and it has been the Crowbar objective from the start and is the keystone of our Crowbar 2 work.

This has proven to be a formidable challenge for several reasons:

1. diverging DevOps patterns that can be used between private, public, large, small, and other deployments -> solution: attribute injection pattern is promising
2. tooling gaps prevent operators from leveraging shared deployments -> solution: this is part of Crowbar’s mission
3. under investing in community supporting features because they are seen as taking away from getting into production -> solution: need leadership and others with join
4. drift between target versions creates the need for forking even if the cookbooks are fundamentally the same -> solution: pull from source approaches help create distro independent baselines
5. missing reference architectures interfere with having a stable baseline to deploy against -> solution: agree to a standard, machine consumable RA format like OpenStack Heat.

Unfortunately, these five challenges are tightly coupled and we have to progress on them simultaneously. The tooling and community requires patterns and RAs.

The good news is that we are making real progress.

Judd Maltin (@newgoliath), a Crowbar team member, has documented the emerging Attribute Injection practice that Crowbar has been leading. That practice has been refined in the open by ATT and Rackspace. It is forming the foundation of the OpenStack cookbooks.

Understanding, discussing and supporting that pattern is an important step toward accelerating open operations. Please engage with us as we make the investments for open operations and help us implement the pattern.