We started the Crowbar project because we needed to make OpenStack deployments to be fast, repeatable and sharable.  We wanted a tool that looked at deployments as a system and integrated with our customers’ operations environment.  Crowbar was born as an MVP and quickly grew into a more dynamic tool that could deploy OpenStack, Hadoop, Ceph and other applications, but most critically we recognized that our knowledge gaps where substantial and we wanted to collaborate with others on the learning.  The result of that learning was a rearchitecture effort that we started at OSCON in 2012.

After nearly two years, I’m proud to show off the framework that we’ve built: OpenCrowbar addresses the limitations of Crowbar 1.x and adds critical new capabilities.

So what’s in OpenCrowbar?  Pretty much what we targeted at the launch and we’ve added some wonderful surprises too:

• Heterogeneous Operating Systems – chose which operating system you want to install on the target servers.
• CMDB Flexibility – don’t be locked in to a devops toolset.  Attribute injection allows clean abstraction boundaries so you can use multiple tools (Chef and Puppet, playing together).
• Ops Annealer –the orchestration at Crowbar’s heart combines the best of directed graphs with late binding and parallel execution.  We believe annealing is the key ingredient for repeatable and OpenOps shared code upgrades
• Upstream Friendly – infrastructure as code works best as a community practice and Crowbar use upstream code without injecting “crowbarisms” that were previously required.  So you can share your learning with the broader DevOps community even if they don’t use Crowbar.
• Node Discovery (or not) – Crowbar maintains the same proven discovery image based approach that we used before, but we’ve streamlined and expanded it.  You can use Crowbar’s API outside of the PXE discovery system to accommodate Docker containers, existing systems and VMs.
• Hardware Configuration – Crowbar maintains the same optional hardware neutral approach to RAID and BIOS configuration.  Configuring hardware with repeatability is difficult and requires much iterative testing.  While our approach is open and generic, my team at Dell works hard to validate a on specific set of gear: it’s impossible to make statements beyond that test matrix.
• Network Abstraction – Crowbar dramatically extended our DevOps network abstraction.  We’ve learned that a networking is the key to success for deployment and upgrade so we’ve made Crowbar networking flexible and concise.  Crowbar networking works with attribute injection so that you can avoid hardwiring networking into DevOps scripts.
• Out of band control – when the Annealer hands off work, Crowbar gives the worker implementation flexibility to do it on the node (using SSH) or remotely (using an API).  Making agents optional means allows operators and developers make the best choices for the actions that they need to take.
• Technical Debt Paydown – We’ve also updated the Crowbar infrastructure to use the latest libraries like Ruby 2, Rails 4, Chef 11.  Even more importantly, we’re dramatically simplified the code structure including in repo documentation and a Docker based developer environment that makes building a working Crowbar environment fast and repeatable.

Why change to OpenCrowbar?  This new generation of Crowbar is structurally different from Crowbar 1 and we’ve investing substantially in refactoring the tooling, paying down technical debt and cleanup up documentation.  Since Crowbar 1 is still being actively developed, splitting the repositories allow both versions to progress with less confusion.  The majority of the principles and deployment code is very similar, I think of Crowbar as a single community.

Interested?  Our new Docker Admin node is quick to setup and can boot and manage both virtual and physical nodes.