Category Archives: OpenCrowbar

To thrive, OpenStack must better balance dev, ops and business needs.

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OpenStack has grown dramatically in many ways but we have failed to integrate development, operations and business communities in a balanced way.

My most urgent observation from Paris is that these three critical parts of the community are having vastly different dialogs about OpenStack.

Clouds DownAt the Conference, business people were talking were about core, stability and utility while the developers were talking about features, reorganizing and expanding projects. The operators, unfortunately segregated in a different location, were trying to figure out how to share best practices and tools.

Much of this structural divergence was intentional and should be (re)evaluated as we grow.

OpenStack events are split into distinct focus areas: the conference for business people, the summit for developers and specialized days for operators. While this design serves a purpose, the community needs to be taking extra steps to ensure communication. Without that communication, corporate sponsors and users may find it easier to solve problems inside their walls than outside in the community.

The risk is clear: vendors may find it easier to work on a fork where they have business and operational control than work within the community.

Inside the community, we are working to help resolve this challenge with several parallel efforts. As a community member, I challenge you to get involved in these efforts to ensure the project balances dev, biz and ops priorities.  As a board member, I feel it’s a leadership challenge to make sure these efforts converge and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been working on several of these efforts:

  • OpenStack Project Managers (was Hidden Influencers) across companies in the ecosystem are getting organized into their own team. Since these managers effectively direct the majority of OpenStack developers, this group will allow
  • DefCore Committee works to define a smaller subset of the overall OpenStack Project that will be required for vendors using the OpenStack trademark and logo. This helps the business community focus on interoperability and stability.
  • Technical leadership (TC) lead “Big Tent” concept aligns with DefCore work and attempts to create a stable base platform while making it easier for new projects to enter the ecosystem. I’ve got a lot to say about this, but frankly, without safeguards, this scares people in the ops and business communities.
  • An operations “ready state” baseline keeps the community from being able to share best practices – this has become a pressing need.  I’d like to suggest as OpenCrowbar an outside of OpenStack a way to help provide an ops neutral common starting point. Having the OpenStack developer community attempting to create an installer using OpenStack has proven a significant distraction and only further distances operators from the community.

We need to get past seeing the project primarily as a technology platform.  Infrastructure software has to deliver value as an operational tool for enterprises.  For OpenStack to thrive, we must make sure the needs of all constituents (Dev, Biz, Ops) are being addressed.

API Driven Metal = OpenCrowbar + Chef Provisioning

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The OpenCrowbar community created a Chef-Provisioning driver that allows you to quickly build hardware clusters using Chef cookbooks.

2012-08-05_14-13-18_310When we started using Chef in 2011, there was a distinct gap around bootstrapping systems.  The platform did a great job of automation and even connecting services together (via the Search anti-pattern, see below) but lacked a way to build the initial clusters automatically.

The current answer to this problem from Chef is refreshingly simply: a cookbook API extension called Chef Provisioning.  This approach uses the regular Chef DSL in recipes to create request and bind a cluster into Chef.  Basically, the code simply builds an array of nodes using an API that creates the nodes if they are missing from the array in the code.  Specifically, when a node is missing from the array, Chef calls out to create the node in an external system.

For clouds, that means using the API to request a server and then inject credentials for Chef management.  It’s trickier for physical gear because you cannot just make a server in the configuration you need it in.  Physical systems must first be discovered and profiled to ready state: the system must know how many NICs and disk drives are available to correctly configure the hardware prior to laying down the Operating System.

Consequently, Chef Provisioning automation is more about reallocation of existing discovered physical assets to Chef.  That’s exactly the approach the OpenCrowbar team took for our Chef Provisioning driver.

OpenCrowbar interacts with Chef Provisioning by pulling nodes from the System deployment into a Chef Provisioning deployment.  That action then allows the API client to request specific configurations like Operating System or network that need to be setup for Chef to execute.  Once these requests are made, Crowbar will simply run its normal annealing processes to ready state and then injects the Chef credentials.  Chef waits until the work queue is empty and then takes over management of the asset.  When Chef is finished, Crowbar can be instructed to reconfigure the node back to a base state.

Does that sound simple?  It is simple because the Crowbar APIs match the Chef needs very cleanly.

It’s worth noting that this integration is a great test of the OpenCrowbar API design.  Over the last two years, we’ve evolved the API to make it more final result focused.  Late binding is a critical concept for the project and the APIs reflect that objective.  For Chef Provisioning, we allow the integration to focus on simple requests like “give me a node then put this O/S on the node and go.”  Crowbar has the logic needed to figure out how to accomplish those objectives without much additional instruction.

Bonus Side Note: Why Search can become an anti-pattern?  

Search is an incredibly powerful feature in Chef that allows cross-role and cross-node integration; unfortunately, it’s also very difficult to maintain as complexity and contributor counts grow.  The reason is that search creates “forward dependencies” in the scripts that require operators creating data to be aware of downstream, hidden consumers.  High Availability (HA) is a clear example.  If I add a new “cluster database” role to the system then it is very likely to return multiple results for database searches.  That’s excellent until I learn that my scripts have coded search to assume that we only return one result for database lookups.  It’s very hard to find these errors since the searches are decoupled and downstream of the database cookbook.  Ultimately, the community had to advise against embedded search for shared cookbooks

OpenCrowbar 2.B to deliver multiple hardware vendor support and advanced integrations

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I’ve stayed quiet on the subject of Crowbar for a few months, but that does not mean that Crowbar has been.  Activity has been picking up, after Dell pulled resources off, to complete hardware configuration.

[Disclosure: As of 10/3/2014, I am no longer a Dell employee]

With the re-addition of hardware configuration, OpenCrowbar delivers the essential requirements for Ready State and we’ve piloted integration that shows how to drive Crowbar via the API.

From BuildersKnowledge

There has been substantial burn-down on the Broom release theme of hardware workload deliverable which mainly focus on the IPMI/BMC, RAID and BIOS functions working in the framework.  It has required us to add additional out-of-band abstractions (“hammers”) and node abstractions (“quirks”).

We’ve also had a chance to work ahead on the Camshaft release theme of tools integration components like:

  •         SaltStack Integration – Crowbar sets up a Salt master and minions on discovered metal (pull request)
  •         Chef Metal Integration – a Chef Metal driver talks to the Crowbar API to claim discovered servers from an allocation pool (Judd’s repo).
  •         Puppet Integration – Crowbar is able to use the stand-alone mode to execute Puppet manifests on the nodes (as a replacement for Foreman) (puppet sa client).
  •         Chef Integration – not new, but worth including in the list so it’s not overlooked! (chef-client install)
  • We also added some essential operational configurations including Squid proxy setup and auto configuration and preparing a Consul foundation for future integration with HashiCorp tools

These initial integration are key to being able to bring in OpenStack via Packstack, Chef Cookbooks, or Salt formulas.  Since Crowbar is agnostic about OS, Hardware and Configuration Management tools (Chef, Puppet, Salt), I am seeing interest from several fronts in parallel.  There seems to be substantial interest in RDO + Centos 7 using Packstack or Chef.  Happily, OpenCrowbar.Broom is ready to sweep in those workloads.

There is significant need for Crowbar to deliver ready state under these deployers.  For example, preparing the os, disk, monitoring, cache, networking and SDN infrastructure (OVS, Contrails) are outside the scripts but essential to a sustainable deployment.

These ready state configurations are places where Crowbar creates repeatable cross-platform base that spans the operational choices.