Almost a manifesto!
The RackN team did not plan to replace Cobbler, we just needed something that responded to our need for full-cycle cross-platform DevOps automation.
Provisioning an O/S is never enough! You need to coordinate a lot of operational activity to deploy a multi-node system, like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Ceph. Since we believe an automated upgrade path is also required, there is a huge gap in provisioning.
So what was needed? Here’s our (rather long!) list of gaps to fill for full Metal DevOps provisioning:
| Gap | Commentary | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Needs to work with Cobbler! | Improve? Yes. Disrupt? Hell No! It has to be OK to leave Cobbler in place while we do something better. I’d be OK to tweak my Cobber to point it to the new stuff. |
| 2 | REST API & JSON CLI | Beyond the obvious API, we really want a way to write scripts that drive deployment proactively. |
| 3 | Modular Components | If… |
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Rob Hirschfeld 