Category Archives: Canonical

Crowbar cuts OpenStack Grizzly (“pebbles”) branch & seeks community testing

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Pebbles CutThe Crowbar team (I work for Dell) continues to drive towards “zero day” deployment readiness. Our Hadoop deployments are tracking Dell | Cloudera Hadoop-powered releases within a month and our OpenStack releases harden within three months.

During the OpenStack summit, we cut our Grizzly branch (aka “pebbles”) and switched over to the release packages. Just a reminder, we basically skipped Folsom. While we’re still tuning out issues on OpenStack Networking (OVS+GRE) setup, we’re also looking for community to start testing and tuning the Chef deployment recipes.

We’re just sprints from release; consequently, it’s time for the Crowbar/OpenStack community to come and play! You can learn Grizzly and help tune the open source Ops scripts.

While the Crowbar team has been generating a lot of noise around our Crowbar 2.0 work, we have not neglected progress on OpenStack Grizzly.  We’ve been building Grizzly deploys on the 1.x code base using pull-from-source to ensure that we’d be ready for the release. For continuity, these same cookbooks will be the foundation of our CB2 deployment.

Features of Crowbar’s OpenStack Grizzly Deployments

  • We’ve had Nova Compute, Glance Image, Keystone Identity, Horizon Dashboard, Swift Object and Tempest for a long time. Those, of course, have been updated to Grizzly.
  • Added Block Storage
    • importable Ceph Barclamp & OpenStack Block Plug-in
    • Equalogic OpenStack Block Plug-in
  • Added Quantum OpenStack Network Barclamp
    • Uses OVS + GRE for deployment
  • 10 GB networking configuration
  • Rabbit MQ as its own barclamp
  • Swift Object Barclamps made a lot of progress in Folsom that translates to Grizzly
    • Apache Web Service
    • Rack awareness
    • HA configuration
    • Distribution Report
  • “Under the covers” improvements for Crowbar 1.x
    • Substantial improvements in how we configure host networking
    • Numerous bug fixes and tweaks
  • Pull from Source via the Git barclamp
    • Grizzly branch was switched to use Ubuntu & SUSE packages

We’ve made substantial progress, but there are still gaps. We do not have upgrade paths from Essex or Folsom. While we’ve been adding fault-tolerance features, full automatic HA deployments are not included.

Please build your own Crowbar ISO or check our new SoureForge download site then join the Crowbar List and IRC to collaborate with us on OpenStack (or Hadoop or Crowbar 2). Together, we will make this awesome.

OpenStack Summit: Let’s talk DevOps, Fog, Upgrades, Crowbar & Dell

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If you are coming to the OpenStack summit in San Diego next week then please find me at the show! I want to hear from you about the Foundation, community, OpenStack deployments, Crowbar and anything else.  Oh, and I just ordered a handful of Crowbar stickers if you wanted some CB bling.

Matt Ray (Opscode), Jason Cannavale (Rackspace) and I were Ops track co-chairs. If you have suggestions, we want to hear. We managed to get great speakers and also some interesting sessions like DevOps panel and up streaming deploy working sessions. It’s only on Monday and Tuesday, so don’t snooze or you’ll miss it.

My team from Dell has a lot going on, so there are lots of chances to connect with us:

At the Dell booth, Randy Perryman will be sharing field experience about hardware choices. We’ve got a lot of OpenStack battle experience and we want to compare notes with you.

I’m on the board meeting on Monday so likely occupied until the Mirantis party.

See you in San Diego!

PS: My team is hiring for Dev, QA and Marketing. Let me know if you want details.

Crowbar Celebrates 1st Anniversary

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Nearly a year ago at OSCON 2011, my team at Dell opened sourced “Crowbar, an OpenStack installer.” That first Github commit was a much more limited project than Crowbar today: there was no separation into barclamps, no distinct network configuration, one operating system option and the default passwords were all “openstack.” We simply did not know if our effort would create any interest.

The response to Crowbar has been exciting and humbling. I most appreciate those who looked at Crowbar and saw more than a bare metal installer. They are the ones who recognized that we are trying to solve a bigger problem: it has been too difficult to cope with change in IT operations.

During this year, we have made many changes. Many have been driven by customer, user and partner feedback while others support Dell product delivery needs. Happily, these inputs are well aligned in intent if not always in timing.

  • Introduction of barclamps as modular components
  • Expansion into multiple applications (most notably OpenStack and Apache Hadoop)
  • Multi-Operating System
  • Working in the open (with public commits)
  • Collaborative License Agreements

Dell‘s understanding of open source and open development has made a similar transformation. Crowbar was originally Apache 2 open sourced because we imagined it becoming part of the OpenStack project. While that ambition has faded, the practical benefits of open collaboration have proven to be substantial.

The results from this first year are compelling:

  • For OpenStack Diablo, coordination with the Rackspace Cloud Builder team enabled Crowbar to include the Keystone and Dashboard projects into Dell’s solution
  • For OpenStack Essex, the community focused work we did for the March Essex Hackday are directly linked to our ability to deliver Dell’s OpenStack-Powered Essex solution over two months earlier than originally planned.
  • For Apache Hadoop distributions for 3.x and 4.x with implementation of Cloudera Manager and eco system components.
  • We’ve amassed hundreds of mail subscribers and Github followers
  • Support for multiple releases of RHEL, Centos & Ubuntu including Ubuntu 12.04 while it was still in beta.
  • SuSE does their own port of Crowbar to SuSE with important advances in Crowbar’s install model (from ISO to package).

We stand on the edge of many exciting transformations for Crowbar’s second year. Based on the amount of change from this year, I’m hesitant to make long term predictions. Yet, just within next few months there are significant plans based on Crowbar 2.0 refactor. We have line of site to changes that expand our tool choices, improve networking, add operating systems and become more even production ops capable.

That’s quite a busy year!

Four OpenStack Trends from Summit: Practical, Friendly, Effective and Deployable

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With the next OpenStack Austin meetup on Thursday (sponsored by Puppet), I felt like it was past time for me to post my thoughts and observations about the Spring 2012 OpenStack design conference.  This was my fifth OpenStack conference (my notes about Bexar, Cactus, Diablo & Essex).  Every conference has been unique, exciting, and bigger than the previous.

My interest lies in the trend lines of OpenStack.  For details about sessions, I recommend Stefano Maffulli‘s  excellent link aggregation post for the Summit.

1. Technology Trend: Practical with Potential.

OpenStack started with a BIG vision to become the common platform for cloud API and operations.  That vision is very much alive and on-track; however, our enthusiasm for what could be is tempered by the need to build a rock solid foundation.  The drive to stability over feature expansion has had a very positive impact.  I give a lot of credit for this effort to the leadership of the project technical leads (PTLs), Canonical‘s drive to include OpenStack in the 12.04 LTS and the Rackspace Cloud drive to deploy Essex.  My team at Dell has also been part of this trend by focusing so much effort on making OpenStack production deployable (via Crowbar).

Overall, I am seeing a broad-based drive to minimize disruption.

2. Culture Trend: Friendly but some tension.

Companies at both large and small ends of the spectrum are clearly jockeying for position.  I think the market is big enough for everyone; however, we are also bumping into each other.  Overall, we are putting aside these real and imagined differences to focus on enlarging the opportunity of having a true community cloud platform.  For example, the OpenStack Foundation investment formation has moneyed competitors jostling for position to partner together.

However, it’s not just about paying into the club; OpenStack’s history is clearly about execution.  Looking back to the original Austin Summit sponsors, we’ve clearly seen that intent and commitment are different.

3. Discussion Trend: Small Groups Effective

The depth & quality of discussions inside sessions was highly variable.  Generally, I saw that large group discussions stayed at a very high level.  The smaller sessions required deep knowledge of the code to participate and seemed more productive.  We continue to have a juggle between discussions that are conceptual or require detailed knowledge of the code.  If conceptual, it’s too far removed.  If code, it becomes inaccessible to many people.

This has happened at each Summit and I now accept that it is natural.  We are using vision sessions to ensure consensus and working sessions to coordinate deliverables for the release.

I cannot over emphasize importance of small groups and delivery driven execution interactions: I spent most of my time in small group discussions with partners aligning efforts.

4. Deployment Trend: Testing and Upstreams matter

Operations for deploying OpenStack is a substantial topic at the Summit.  I find that to be a significant benefit to the community because there are a large block of us who were vocal advocates for deployability at the very formation of the project.

From my perspective at Dell, we are proud to see that wide spread acknowledgement of our open source contribution, Crowbar, as the most prominent OpenStack deployer.   Our efforts at making OpenStack installable are recognized as a contribution; however, we’re also getting feedback that we need to streamline and simplify Crowbar.  We also surprised to hear that Crowbar is “opinionated.”   On reflection, I agree (and am proud) of this assessment because it matches best practice coding styles.  Since our opinions also drive our test matrix there is a significant value for our OpenStack deployment is that we spend a lot of time testing (automated and manual) our preferred install process.

There’s a push to reconcile the various Chef OpenStack cookbooks into a single upstream.  This seems like a very good idea because it will allow various parties to collaborate on open operations.  The community needs leadership from Opscode to make this happen.  It appears that Puppet Labs is interested in playing a similar role for Puppet modules but these are still emerging and have not had a chance to fragment.

No matter which path we take, the deployment scripts are only as good as their level of testing.   Unreliable deployment scripts have are less than worthless.

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day: First Steps to Production

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One March 8th, 70 people from around the world gathered on the Crowbar IM channel to begin building a production grade OpenStack Essex deployment. The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in two physical locations: the Nokia offices in Boston and the TechRanch in Austin.

My objective was to enable the community to begin collaboration on Essex Deployment. At that goal, we succeeded beyond my expectations.

IMHO, the top challenge for OpenStack Essex is to build a community of deploying advocates. We have a strong and dynamic development community adding features to the project. Now it is time for us to build a comparable community of deployers. By providing a repeatable, shared and open foundation for OpenStack deployments, we create a baseline that allows collaboration and co-development. Not only must we make deployments easy and predictable, we must also ensure they are scalable and production ready.

Having solid open production deployment infrastructure drives OpenStack adoption.

Our goal on the 8th was not to deliver finished deployments; it was to the start of Essex deployment community collaboration. To ensure that we could focus on getting to an Essex baseline, our team invested substantial time before the event to make sure that participants had a working Essex reference deployment.

By the nature of my team’s event leadership and our approach to OpenStack, the event was decidedly Crowbar focused. I feel like this is an acceptable compromise because Crowbar is open and provides a repeatable foundation. If everyone has the same foundation then we can focus on the truly critical challenges of ensuring consistent OpenStack deployments. Even using Crowbar, we waste a lot of time trying to figure out the differences between configurations. Lack of baseline consistency seriously impedes collaboration.

The fastest way to collaborate on OpenStack deployment is to have a reference deployment as a foundation.

Success By The Numbers

This was a truly international community collaborative event. Here are some of the companies that participated:

Dell (sponsor), Nokia (sponsor), Rackspace, Opscode, Canonical, Fedora, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Nicira, Enstratus, Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Purdue University, Orbital Software Solutions, XepCloud and others.

PLEASE COMMENT here if I missed your company and I will add it to the list.

On the day of the event, we collected the following statistics:

  • 70 people on Skype IM channel (it’s not too late to join by pinging DellCrowbar with “Essex barclamps”).
  • 14+ companies
  • 2 physical sites with 10-15 people at each
  • 4 fold increase in traffic on the Crowbar Github to 813 hits.
  • 66 downloads of the Deploy day ISO
  • 8 videos capture from deploy day sessions.
  • World-wide participation

For over 70 people to spend a day together at this early stage in deployment is a truly impressive indication of the excitement that is building around OpenStack.

Improvements for Next Deploy Day

This was a first time that Andi Abes (Boston event lead), Rob Hirschfeld (Austin event lead) or Jean-Marie Martini (Dell event lead) had ever coordinated an event like this. We owe much of the success to efforts by Greg Althaus, Victor Lowther and the Canonical 12.04/Essex team before the event. Also, having physical sites was very helpful.

We are planning to do another event, so we are carefully tracking ways to improve.

Here are some issues we are tracking.

  • Issues with setting up a screen and voice share that could handle 70 people.
  • Lack of test & documentation on Crowbar meant too much time focused on Crowbar
  • Connectivity issues distributed voice
  • Should have started with DevStack as a baseline
  • more welcome in the comments!

Thank you!

I want to thank everyone who participated in making this event a huge success!