Greg Althaus at 11/15 Austin Cloud User Group meeting (annotated 90 min audio)

Greg Althaus did a 90 minute Crowbar deep dive at this week’s Austin Cloud User Group.  Brad Knowles recorded audio and posted it so I thought I’d share the link and my annotations.  There are a lot more times to catch up with our team at Dell in Austin, Boston, and Seattle.

Video Annotations –  (##:## time stamp)

  • 00:00 Intros & Meeting Management
  • 12:00 Joseph George Introduction / Sponsorship
  • 16:00 Greg Starts – why Crowbar
  • 19:00 DevOps slides
  • 21:00 What does Crowbar do for DevOps
    • make it easier to manage
    • make it easier to repeat
  • 24:00 What’s included – how we grow / where to start
  • 27:20 Starting to show crowbar – what’s included as barclamps
    • pluggable / configuration
    • Barclamps!
  • 28:10 What is a barclamp
    • discussion about the barclamps in the base
  • 34:30: We ❤ Chef. Puppet vs Chef
  • 36:00 Why barclamps are more than cookbooks
  • 36:30 State machine & transitions
  • Q&A Section
    • 38:50 Reference Architectures
    • 43:00 Barclamps work outside of Crowbar?
    • 44:15 Hardware models supported
    • 47:30 Storage Queston
    • 49:00 HA progress
    • 53:00 Ceph as a distributed cloud on all nodes
    • 56:20 Deployer has a map of how to give out roles
  • 58:00 Demo Fails
  • 58:30 Crowbar Architecture
  • 62:00 How Crowbar can be extended
  • 63:00 Workflow & Proposals
  • 65:40 Meta Barclamps
  • 71:10 Chef Environments
  • 73:40 Taking OpenStack releases and Environments
  • 75:00 The case for remove recipes
  • 77:33 Git Hub Tour
  • 79:00 Network Barclamp deep dive
  • 84:00 Adding switch config (roadmap topic)
  • 86:30 Conduits
  • 87:40 Barclamp Extensions / Services
  • 89:00 Questions
    • 89:20 Proposal operations
    • 93:30 OpenStack Readiness & Crowbar Design Approach
    • 93:10 Network Teaming
    • 94:30 Which OS & Hypervisors
    • 96:30 Continuous Integration & Tools
    • 98:40 BDD (“cucumberesque”) & Testing
    • 99:40 Build approach & barclamp construction
  • 100:00 Wrap up by Joseph

Talk with Team Crowbar! Online 11/8, Austin 11/15, Boston 11/29 & 11/29 & Seattle 11/30

My team at Dell has been getting a great response from our community about Crowbar. Thanks! We’re actively working a rock solid OpenStack deployment that will raise the bar on ease of deploy and drive operational excellence.

We have also heard that we need to improve access to the team; consequently, I’m delighted to announce a long list of places and dates where you can access us online AND in person.

Here’s the list:

Or in a calendar view:

Sun Mon Tuesday Wed Thursday Fri Sat
11/8 Online
Crowbar Chat
11/15 Austin
Cloud User
11/29 Boston
OpenStack Meetup
11/30 Seattle
Crowbar Drinks TBD
12/6 Boston
Opscode BoaF
12/8 Austin
OpenStack Meetup

Notes from 10/27 OpenStack Austin Meetup (via Stephen Spector)

Stephen Spector (now a Dell Services employee!) gave me permission to repost his excellent notes from the first OpenStack Austin (#OSATX) Meetup Group.

Here are his notes:

[Stephen] wanted to update everyone on the Austin OpenStack Meetup last night at the Austin TechRanch sponsored by Joseph and Rob (that’s me!) of the Dell OpenStack team (I think I got that right?). You can find all the tweets from the event at https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23osatx as we created a new hashtag for tweeting during the event, #osatx.

Here are some highlights from the event:

  • About 60 or so attendees with a good amount from Dell (Barton George, Logan McCloud)and Rackspace, Opscode (Matt Ray), Puppet Labs, SUSE talked about their OpenStack commitment (http://t.co/bBnIO7xv), and Ubuntu folks as well
  • Jon Dickinson who is the Project Technical Lead for Swift (Object Storage) was there and presented information on the current Swift offering; It is interesting to note that Swift releases continuously when most of OpenStack releases during the 6 month development cycle like Nova (Compute)
  • Stephen and Jim Plamondon from Rackspace presented information on the overall community and talked about the announcement yesterday from Internap about their Compute public cloud and the information on the MercadoLibre 600 Node Compute cloud running their business:

“With 58 million users of MercadoLibre.com and growing rapidly, we need to provide our teams instant access to computing resources without heavy administrative layers. With OpenStack, our internal users can instantly provision what they need without having to wait for a system administrator,” said Alejandro Comisario, Infrastructure Senior Engineer, MercadoLibre, the largest online trading platform in Latin America. “With our success running OpenStack Compute in production, we plan to roll OpenStack Diablo out more broadly across the company, and have appreciated the community support in this venture, especially through the OpenStack Forums, where we are also global moderators.”

  • Discussion on the OpenStack API Issue which is a significant open issue at this time – should OpenStack focus on creating an API specification and then let multiple implementations of that API move forward or build 1 implementation of the API as official OpenStack (see my post for more on this).
  • Greg Althaus gave a demo of the Nova Dashboard
  • Future Meetings
  • Three organizations have offered to help host (pizza $ and TechRanch space $) but we always need more!  You can offer to sponsor via the meetup site.
  • There will be future OpenStack Austin Meetups so sign up for the group and you’ll be notified automatically.

Pictures…

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Austin OpenStack Cloud Meetup: Thursday 10/27 6:30 PM at TechRanch Austin

OpenStack Enthusiasts, you are OFFICIALLY INVITED to Austin’s first post-Diablo OpenStack community event.

Dell is sponsoring an Austin OpenStack Meet Up help connect the Austin community around OpenStack and open source clouds!

Link: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/37908242/

We’ve got members of the Rackspace Cloud Builders Training team in town and Dell’s own Crowbar team attending.  We’re planning to do OpenStack demos and talk about the project in detail – and we’ll have plenty of pizza and sodas to keep the cloud juices flowing.

This is a great way to learn about the OpenStack cloud project and meet other people who are developing/deploying the hottest open source cloud around.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD – we’re trying to make this inaugural OpenStack meetup a big success!

See you there,

Joseph @jbgeorge George & Rob @Zehicle Hirschfeld