Category Archives: Suse

Just for fun, putting themes to OpenStack Conferences

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been to every OpenStack summit and, in retrospect, each one has a different theme.  I see these as community themes beyond the releases train that cover how the OpenStack ecosystem has changed.

The themes are, of course, highly subjective and intented to spark reflection and discussion.

City Release Theme My Commentary
ATL Ice House Its my sandbox! The new marketplace is great and there are also a lot of vendors who want to differentiate their offering and are not sure where to play.
HK Havana Project land grab It felt like a PTL gold rush as lots of new projects where tossed into the ecosystem mix.  I’m wary of perceived “anointed” projects that define “the way” to do things.
PDX Grizzly Shiny new things We went from having a defined core set of projects to a much richer and varied platforms, environments and solutions.
SD Folsom Breaking up is hard to do Nova began to fragment (cinder & quantum neutron)
SF Essex New kids are here Move over Rackspace.  Lots of new operating systems, providers, consulting and hosting companies participating.  Stackalytics makes it into a real commit race.
BOS Diablo Race to be the first Everyone was trying to show that OpenStack could be used for real work.  Lots of startups launched.
SJC Cactus Oh, you like us! We need some process This is real so everyone was exporing OpenStack.  We clearly needed to figure out how to work together.  This is where we migrated to git.
SA Bexar We’re going to take over the world We handed out rose-colored classes that mostly turned out pretty accurate; however. many some top names from that time are not in the community now (Citrix, NASA, Accenture, and others).
ATX Austin We choose “none of the above” There was a building sense of potential energy while companies figured out that 1) there was a gap and 2) they wanted to fill it together.

OpenStack automated high-availability deploy reality, SUSE shows off chops with Crowbar

Posted on by
3

While I’ve been focused on delivering next-generation kick-aaS-i-ness with Crowbar v2 (now called OpenCrowbar) and helping the Dell and Red Hat co-engineer a OpenStack Powered Cloud, SUSE has been continuing to expand and polish the OpenStack deployment on Crowbar v1.  I’m always impressed by commit activity (SUSE is the top committer in the Crowbar project) and was excited to see their Havana launch announcement.

Using Crowbar v1, SUSE is delivering a seriously robust automated OpenStack Havana implementation.  They have taken the time to build high availability (HA) across the framework including for Neutron, Heat and Ceilometer.

As an OpenStack Foundation board member, I hear a lot of hand-wringing in the community about ops practices and asking “is OpenStack is ready for the enterprise?”  While I’m not sure how to really define “enterprise,” I do know that SUSE Cloud Havana release version also) shows that it’s possible to deliver a repeatable and robust OpenStack deployment.

This effort shows some serious DevOps automation chops and, since Crowbar is open, everyone in the community can benefit from their tuning.   Of course, I’d love to see these great capabilities migrate into the very active StackForge Chef OpenStack cookbooks that OpenCrowbar is designed to leverage.

Creating HA automation is a great achievement and an important milestone in capturing the true golden fleece – automated release-to-release upgrades.  We built the OpenCrowbar annealer with this objective in mind and I feel like it’s within reach.

Crowbar HK Hack Report

Posted on by
1

Purple Fuzzy H for Hackathon (and Havana)Overall, I’m happy with our three days of hacking on Crowbar 2.  We’ve reached the critical “deploys workload” milestone and I’m excited about well the design is working and how clearly we’ve been able to articulate our approach in code & UI.

Of course, it’s worth noting again that Crowbar 1 has also had significant progress on OpenStack Havana workloads running on Ubuntu, Centos/RHEL, and SUSE/SLES

Here are the focus items from the hack:

  • Documentation – cleaned up documentation specifically by updating the README in all the projects to point to the real documentation in an effort to help people find useful information faster.  Reminder: if unsure, put documentation in barclamp-crowbar/doc!
  • Docker Integration for Crowbar 2 progress.  You can now install Docker from internal packages on an admin node.  We have a strategy for allowing containers be workload nodes.
  • Ceph installed as workload is working.  This workload revealed the need for UI improvements and additional flags for roles (hello “cluster”)
  • Progress on OpenSUSE and Fedora as Crowbar 2 install targets.  This gets us closer to true multi-O/S support.
  • OpenSUSE 13.1 setup as a dev environment including tests.  This is a target working environment.
  • Being 12 hours offset from the US really impacted remote participation.

One thing that became obvious during the hack is that we’ve reached a point in Crowbar 2 development where it makes sense to move the work into distinct repositories.  There are build, organization and packaging changes that would simplify Crowbar 2 and make it easier to start using; however, we’ve been trying to maintain backwards compatibility with Crowbar 1.  This is becoming impossible; consequently, it appears time to split them.  Here are some items for consideration:

  1. Crowbar 2 could collect barclamps into larger “workload” repos so there would be far fewer repos (although possibly still barclamps within a workload).  For example, there would be a “core” set that includes all the current CB2 barclamps.  OpenStack, Ceph and Hadoop would be their own sets.
  2. Crowbar 2 would have a clearly named “build” or “tools” repo instead of having it called “crowbar”
  3. Crowbar 2 framework would be either part of “core” or called “framework”
  4. We would put these in a new organization (“Crowbar2” or “Crowbar-2”) so that the clutter of Crowbar’s current organization is avoided.

While we clearly need to break apart the repo, this suggestion needs community more discussion!

Looking to Leverage OpenStack Havana? Crowbar delivers 3xL!

Posted on by
1

openstack_havanaThe Crowbar community has a tradition of “day zero ops” community support for the latest OpenStack release at the summit using our pull-from-source capability.  This release we’ve really gone the extra mile by doing it one THREE Linux distros (Ubuntu, RHEL & SLES) in parallel with a significant number of projects and new capabilities included.

I’m especially excited about Crowbar implementation of Havana Docker support which required advanced configuration with Nova and Glance.  The community also added Heat and Celiometer in the last release cycle plus High Availability (“Titanium”) deployment work is in active development.  Did I mention that Crowbar is rocking OpenStack deployments?  No, because it’s redundant to mention that.  We’ll upload ISOs of this work for easy access later in the week.

While my team at Dell remains a significant contributor to this work, I’m proud to point out to SUSE Cloud leadership and contributions also (including the new Ceph barclamp & integration).  Crowbar has become a true multi-party framework!

 

Want to learn more?  If you’re in Hong Kong, we are hosting a Crowbar Developer Community Meetup on Monday, November 4, 2013, 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM (HKT) in the SkyCity Marriott SkyZone Meeting Room.  Dell, dotCloud/Docker, SUSE and others will lead a lively technical session to review and discuss the latest updates, advantages and future plans for the Crowbar Operations Platform. You can expect to see some live code demos, and participate in a review of the results of a recent Crowbar 2 hackathon.  Confirm your seat here – space is limited!  (I expect that we’ll also stream this event using Google Hangout, watch Twitter #Crowbar for the feed)

My team at Dell has a significant presence at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong (details about activities including sponsored parties).  Be sure to seek out my fellow OpenStack Board Member Joseph George, Dell OpenStack Product Manager Kamesh Pemmaraju and Enstratius/Dell Multi-Cloud Manager Founder George Reese.

Note: The work referenced in this post is about Crowbar v1.  We’ve also reached critical milestones with Crowbar v2 and will begin implementing Havana on that platform shortly.

SUSE Cloud powered by OpenStack > Demo using Crowbar

Posted on by
1

OpenStack booth at HostingConAs much as I love talking about Crowbar and OpenStack, it’s even more fun to cheer for other people doing it!

SUSE’s be a great development partner for Crowbar and an active member of the OpenStack community.  I’m excited to see them giving a live demo today about their OpenStack technology stack (which includes Crowbar and Ceph).

Register for the Live Demo on Wed 06-26-2013 at 3.00 – 4.00 pm GMT to “learn about SUSE’s OpenStack distribution: SUSE Cloud with Dell Crowbar as the deployment mechanism and advanced features such as Ceph unified storage platform for object, block and file storage in the cloud.”

The presenter, Rick Ashford, lives in Austin and is a regular at the OpenStack Austin Meetups.  He has been working with Linux and open-source software since 1998 and currently specializes in the OpenStack cloud platform and the SUSE ecosystem surrounding it.

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

Posted on by
7

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 2.0 Design Summit Notes (+ open weekly meetings starting)

Posted on by
1

I could not be happier with the results Crowbar collaborators and my team at Dell achieved around the 1st Crowbar design summit. We had great discussions and even better participation.

The attendees represented major operating system vendors, configuration management companies, OpenStack hosting companies, OpenStack cloud software providers, OpenStack consultants, OpenStack private cloud users, and (of course) a major infrastructure provider. That’s a very complete cross-section of the cloud community.

I knew from the start that we had too little time and, thankfully, people were tolerant of my need to stop the discussions. In the end, we were able to cover all the planned topics. This was important because all these features are interlocked so discussions were iterative. I was impressed with the level of knowledge at the table and it drove deep discussion. Even so, there are still parts of Crowbar that are confusing (networking, late binding, orchestration, chef coupling) even to collaborators.

In typing up these notes, it becomes even more blindingly obvious that the core features for Crowbar 2 are highly interconnected. That’s no surprise technically; however, it will make the notes harder to follow because of knowledge bootstrapping. You need take time and grok the gestalt and surf the zeitgeist.

Collaboration Invitation: I wanted to remind readers that this summit was just the kick-off for a series of open weekly design (Tuesdays 10am CDT) and coordination (Thursdays 8am CDT) meetings. Everyone is welcome to join in those meetings – information is posted, recorded, folded, spindled and mutilated on the Crowbar 2 wiki page.

These notes are my reflection of the online etherpad notes that were made live during the meeting. I’ve grouped them by design topic.

Introduction

  • Contributors need to sign CLAs
  • We are refactoring Crowbar at this time because we have a collection of interconnected features that could not be decoupled
  • Some items (Database use, Rails3, documentation, process) are not for debate. They are core needs but require little design.
  • There are 5 key topics for the refactor: online mode, networking flexibility, OpenStack pull from source, heterogeneous/multi operating systems, being CDMB agnostic
  • Due to time limits, we have to stop discussions and continue them online.
  • We are hoping to align Crowbar 2 beta and OpenStack Folsom release.

Online / Connected Mode

  • Online mode is more than simply internet connectivity. It is the foundation of how Crowbar stages dependencies and components for deploy. It’s required for heterogeneous O/S, pull from source and it has dependencies on how we model networking so nodes can access resources.
  • We are thinking to use caching proxies to stage resources. This would allow isolated production environments and preserves the run everything from ISO without a connection (that is still a key requirement to us).
  • Suse’s Crowbar fork does not build an ISO, instead it relies on RPM packages for barclamps and their dependencies.
  • Pulling packages directly from the Internet has proven to be unreliable, this method cannot rely on that alone.

Install From Source

  • This feature is mainly focused on OpenStack, it could be applied more generally. The principals that we are looking at could be applied to any application were the source code is changing quickly (all of them?!). Hadoop is an obvious second candidate.
  • We spent some time reviewing the use-cases for this feature. While this appears to be very dev and pre-release focused, there are important applications for production. Specifically, we expect that scale customers will need to run ahead of or slightly adjacent to trunk due to patches or proprietary code. In both cases, it is important that users can deploy from their repository.
  • We discussed briefly our objective to pull configuration from upstream (not just OpenStack, but potentially any common cookbooks/modules). This topic is central to the CMDB agnostic discussion below.
  • The overall sentiment is that this could be a very powerful capability if we can manage to make it work. There is a substantial challenge in tracking dependencies – current RPMs and Debs do a good job of this and other configuration steps beyond just the bits. Replicating that functionality is the real obstacle.

CMDB agnostic (decoupling Chef)

  • This feature is confusing because we are not eliminating the need for a configuration management database (CMDB) tool like Chef, instead we are decoupling Crowbar from the a single CMDB to a pluggable model using an abstraction layer.
  • It was stressed that Crowbar does orchestration – we do not rely on convergence over multiple passes to get the configuration correct.
  • We had strong agreement that the modules should not be tightly coupled but did need a consistent way (API? Consistent namespace? Pixie dust?) to share data between each other. Our priority is to maintain loose coupling and follow integration by convention and best practices rather than rigid structures.
  • The abstraction layer needs to have both import and export functions
  • Crowbar will use attribute injection so that Cookbooks can leverage Crowbar but will not require Crowbar to operate. Crowbar’s database will provide the links between the nodes instead of having to wedge it into the CMDB.
  • In 1.x, the networking was the most coupled into Chef. This is a major part of the refactor and modeling for Crowbar’s database.
  • There are a lot of notes captured about this on the etherpad – I recommend reviewing them

Heterogeneous OS (bare metal provisioning and beyond)

  • This topic was the most divergent of all our topics because most of the participants were using some variant of their own bare metal provisioning project (check the etherpad for the list).
  • Since we can’t pack an unlimited set of stuff on the ISO, this feature requires online mode.
  • Most of these projects do nothing beyond OS provisioning; however, their simplicity is beneficial. Crowbar needs to consider users who just want a stream-lined OS provisioning experience.
  • We discussed Crowbar’s late binding capability, but did not resolve how to reconcile that with these other projects.
  • Critical use cases to consider:
    • an API for provisioning (not sure if it needs to be more than the current one)
    • pick which Operating Systems go on which nodes (potentially with a rules engine?)
    • inventory capabilities of available nodes (like ohai and factor) into a database
    • inventory available operating systems

Community Participation in Crowbar 2.0 Efforts

Posted on by
3

I’ve laid out the Dell Crowbar team‘s technical objectives for Crowbar 2.0. Now it’s time to lay out how we plan to involve the Crowbar community. We welcome community participation and contributions but, I’m not making any pretense here, that refactoring must also satisfy needs expressed by the “Dell OpenStack powered Cloud” and “Dell | Cloudera Apache Hadoop” solutions. There is a happy alignment between Dell’s needs and our community’s since both of these solutions are openly developed.

Our community played a substantial role in the definition of Crowbar 2.0. We have been watching and listening carefully and the majority of the changes will leverage recommendations and address concerns raised by Crowbar users.

The Dell Crowbar team has been working towards Crowbar 2 for quite a while. Networking and operating system code is already in place and our team began design requirements for the refactoring mid-June.

Community Communication

We have setup the following meeting for community engagement around the Crowbar refactoring. Our purpose is to enable development collaboration during the refactoring – these will not be “learning Crowbar” sessions.

  • Design Brief (2 hour meeting)
    • Objective: Review by of design and refactoring plans in progress by Dell Crowbar team. Provide basis for community input and discussion during week.
    • When: Monday 7/16 at 10am CDT
    • Where: Online Session
    • Who: Anyone (this is a listening session, not a discussion event)
  • Design Summit (4+2 hour meeting)
    • Objective: Provide input and suggestions about design proposal (see preparation). Identify members of collaboration teams for refactoring effort.
    • Preparation: Attend 7/16 Design Brief & Complete Expert Homework.
    • When: Friday 7/20
    • Where: OSCON 2012 in Portland (not on-site at OSCON). To facilitate face-to-face dialog, there will be no interactive online component.
    • Who: 20 people, invitation only due to space limitations. Attendees representing DevOps tools, hosting companies, operating system vendors, Hadoop & OpenStack contributors
    • Notes will be posted
  • Follow-up sessions
    • Objective: Coordinate delivery of refactored code
    • When: Likely weekly following Summit
    • Where: Online (Skype or Google Hangout)
    • Who: Crowbar Developers

Of course, we will continue to engage on the Crowbar list and Skype channels.

More on the 7/20 Design Summit

The purpose of the summit is strictly limited to discussing and organizing efforts around Crowbar 2.0 refactoring. To maintain a tight focus on this effort, we made the decision to limit the audience of this event by making it in-person and invitation only.

The Summit is not a broad discussion about Crowbar’s future with an open space format. We have a specific need and agenda – coordinating the development of 2.0. For that reason, we made to decision to restrict invitations to partners who are ready to commit substantial effort towards Crowbar development in the next 6 months. This is a technical session only: attendees must have first-hand experience coding Crowbar, be able to build the code and take on development or test commitments.

Because of the time limitations, we are holding a mandatory pre-summit brief about the design changes. This session will be open for the community and we welcome comments.

The agenda for the Design Summit is as follows:

  • 8:30 (45 mins): Crowbar 2.0 Challenges & Objectives
  • 9:15 (30 mins): Packaging and Delivery
  • 9:45 (15 mins) Break
  • 10:00 (30 mins): Networking
  • 10:30 (30 mins): Data Representation and Framework
  • 11:00 (30 mins): Next Steps, Future meetings & work assignments
  • 11:30 official content ends & lunch
  • 12:00 (30 mins) breakout sessions based on discussions above, TBD during summit
  • 12:30 (30 mins) breakout sessions based on discussions above, TBD during summit
  • 1:00 (30 mins) breakout sessions based on discussions above, TBD during summit
  • 1:30 (30 mins) breakout sessions based on discussions above, TBD during summit
  • 2:00 meeting ends

Post Script: A Community Design Summit

We have already begun discussing a true community summit with an open agenda. That summit will likely be a dedicated event in Austin, Texas with 2 (or more!) days of content. Please let me know if this is of interest to you so we can begin building the business case for hosting it!

Crowbar Celebrates 1st Anniversary

Posted on by
1

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!

A SuPEr New Linux for Crowbar! SuSE shows off port and OpenStack deploy

Posted on by
7

During last week’s OpenStack Essex Deploy Day, we featured several OpenStack ecosystem presentations including SuSE, Morphlabs, enStratus, Opscode, and Inktank (Ceph).

SuSE’s presentation (video) was deploying OpenStack using a SuSE port of Crowbar (including a reskinned UI)!

This is a significant for SuSE and Crowbar:

  1. SuSE, a platinum member of the OpenStack foundation, now has an OpenStack Essex distribution. They are offering this deployment as an on-request beta.
  2. Crowbar is now demonstrable operating on the three top Linux distributions.

SuSE is advancing some key architectural proposals for Crowbar because their implementation downloads Crowbar as a package rather than bundling everything into an ISO.

With the Hadoop 4 & OpenStack Essex releases nearly put to bed, it’s time to bring some of this great innovation into the Crowbar trunk.