Category Archives: Greg Althaus

Seattle meetup on 11/30 (will bring massive laptops for OpenStack, Hadoop & Crowbar demos)

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After Greg Althaus and I are done attending the sold out Opcode Community Summit (11/29-30), Opscode has offered to let us have an informal meetup at Opscode HQ from 6:30 to 8pm on 11/30.  I’ve proposed this as an official Seattle OpenStack Meetup (waiting on confirmation from @heckj).

We’re not limiting the agenda to OpenStack!  We’ll happily talk about Hadoop, Crowbar, Opscode or any other cloud technology that’s on your mind.  For 90 minutes, we’re offering Cloud Geeking as a Service (CGaaS).

Not in Seattle?  Never fear!  You can hook up with other members of my team at Dell in Boston on 11/29 & Austin 12/8.

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

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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

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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)

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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…

Continue reading →

OpenStack: Five Challenges & Conference Observations

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I was part of the Dell contingent at the OpenStack design conference earlier in the month.  The conference opened a new chapter for the project because the number of contributing companies reached critical mass.  That means that the core committers are no longer employed by just one or two entities; instead, there are more moneyed interests rubbing elbows and figuring out how to collaborate.

From my perspective (from interview with @Cote ), this changed the tone of the conference from more future looking to pragmatic.

That does not mean that everything is sunshine and rainbows for OpenStack clouds, there are real issues to be resolved.  IMHO, the top issues for OpenStack are:

  1. API implementation vs specification
  2. Building up coverage on continuous integration
  3. Ensuring that we can deploy consistently in multi-node systems
  4. Getting contributions from new members
  5. Figuring out which projects are core, satellite, missing or junk.  [xref 2014 DefCore]

Of these issues, I’ve been reconsidering my position favoring API via Implementation over specification (past position).  This has been a subject of debate on my team at Dell and I like Greg Althaus’ succinct articulation of the problem with implementation driven API: “it is not fair.”  This also ends up being a branding issues for OpenStack because governance needs to figure out which is a “real” OpenStack cloud deployment that can use the brand.  Does it have to be 100% of the source?  What about extensions?  What if it uses the API with an alternate implementation?

Of the other issues, most are related to maturity.  I think #2 needs pressure by and commitment from the larger players (Dell very much included).  Crowbar and the deployment blueprint is our answer #3.  Shouting the “don’t fork it up” chorus from the roof tops addresses contributions while #5 will require some strong governance and inevitably create some hurt feelings.

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

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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

OpenStack Hardware Sessions Slides & Updates to “Bootstrapping Hyperscale Clouds”

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Disclaimer: I work for Dell and we make very fine cloud optimized hardware.  This presentation is NOT slanted towards Dell hardware, it simply reflects lessons learned from listening to our customers.  Of course, people buying Dell servers, networking and storage products pays my salary and WE LOVE OUR CLOUD CUSTOMERS!

This presentation OpenStack Hardware Oct 2011 was the outline for our revisiting of the hyperscale white paper from last fall.  I’m in the process of updating this to reflect lessons learned.

Here are some highlights:

  1. Fault zones are not as critical as expected – customers are putting in more redundancy instead of striping apps
  2. 10 GbE is more popular than expected
  3. Logically segmented redundant networking (teamed) is more popular than physical isolate
  4. Customers are starting small (AnyScale instead of HyperScale)

Shout, chat and whisper with Dell at OpenStack Design Summit & Conference

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My team at Dell has been very (very) busy delivering a lot of great materials for the Fall 2011 OpenStack Design Summit & Conference in Boston MA next week.

Our motto for this conference is “DOING IS DOING” or, perhaps, “DIABLO IS DOING.”

You can count on Dell to be walking the walk with deliverables that advance OpenStack.  In fact, you can watch what we’re doing because it’s posted live as we work with the community to build it.

First, we’ll have our Crowbar demo rack showcasing LIVE MULTI-NODE DIABLO DEPLOYMENTS and some IMPORTANT FEATURE AND COMMUNITY ADDITIONS.  No spoilers here – you’ll have to come by.  Of course, it’s in the git hub too, but we’ve put a bow on it.

Second, there’s a DEPLOYMENT BLUE PRINT discussion about getting better interlocks between OpenStack development and deployment.  We really need to reduce the pain and lag between adding great features and using those features.

Next, we’ve got a limited audience CONCEPT SNEAK PEEK for something from our labs that we think is very interesting and we’d like to get input about.  Unfortunately, we’re very limited with space & time for this whisper session so you’ll need to contact OpenStack@Dell.com to request an invitation.

Finally, at the Conference, you can see OUR TEAM IN ACTION:

  • Thurs 11:30 – Dell Keynote by John Igoe
  • Thurs 3:30 – Private Cloud Panel w/ Rob Hirschfeld
  • Thurs 4:30 – Hardware Infrastructure w/ Rob Hirschfeld & Greg Althaus
  • Friday 11:00 – Deployments w/ Greg Althaus
  • Friday 3:15 – Crowbar!! w/ Scott Jensen (yes, he does it with the !!)
  • Friday 4:15 – KVM & OpenStack

More conference posts: JB Gorge & Barton George.

Dell Crowbar to deploy OpenStack Diablo Cloud

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Direction in the Cloud

Photo by JB George

This week, some of the Crowbar/Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud team, plus Matt Ray from Opscode, have been working with our partners at Rackspace in San Antonio (see Opscode post about collaboration). Our target is to have Crowbar deliver a core Diablo deployment by the October 2011 design conference (sponsored in part by Dell). This is a collaborative effort and we invite community participation – we are trying to be open and communicative (via the Crowbar listserv) while also respecting that there is a mountain of work if we are to meet deadlines.

We are doing the work in the open on the Crowbar Github so you have access to the very latest capabilities and it also means that the head the Crowbar may be unstable while we add capabilities. We feel like this is an important trade off because it allows us to keep up with the rapid pace of development in OpenStack (and other projects). This is the motivation for the recent modularization work and will continue to be a feature driver for Crowbar enhancements because it allows Crowbar users to easily bring in updated bits.

 

Technical details of pending Crowbar changes

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We’re testing a HUGE batch of changes to Crowbar before we commit them. The changes support the barclamp modularization work and also include the addition of RHEL and network barclamp update.

You may be eager to dig in; however, disruptiveness of these changes means that we are taking extra time to make sure that the build and install still work.

Here’s what you’ll see when we commit the changes:

  • Changes in naming to be more generic
    • Crowbar server user/pass is now crowbar/crowbar (was openstack/openstack)
    • Rails app path now crowbar_framework (was openstack_manager )
  • The pre-split barclamps (/change-image/dell/barclamps/*) have been moved into individual github repos (barclamp-*).
    • Barclamps are pulled into the build using “git submodule”
    • Chef scripts for barclamps are no longer copied and comingled together in the chef directory. They remain in their source directories (default /opt/dell/barclamps)
  • Inside the barclamps, you’ll find
    • A crowbar configuration file to direct the barclamp installer including localization and menu extensions.
    • Path changes to better align with the destination paths (command_line -> bin, app ->crowbar_framework)
    • App views moved under subdirectories
  • Changes to installation scripts
    • Barclamp installation changed to a ruby library so it can do more and be used individually outside of the install process. This allows barclamps to be imported or updated after installation.
    • Changes to create accommodate multiple operating systems
  • Addition of a “redhat-5.6-extra” directory with the RHEL 5.6 installation build components.
    • The RHEL version installs Opcode Chef Server 0.10 (Ubuntu is still 0.9 – community help here?)
  • Crowbar framework Rails app runs under Rainbow instead of Apache.
  • The code for the framework and the barclamp installer has been moved into the crowbar barclamp.
    • The installer bootstraps the crowbar barclamp to install itself.
  • The network barclamp has been substantially changed – that will require additional documentation. Features include
    • Concept of “conduits” that are constructed on nodes to be shared between barclamps
    • Ability to map adapters in a general way to deal with inconsistent enumeration
    • Mapping conduits to adapters allows for new teaming and multiple teaming configurations

We’ll post to the Crowbar listserv when changes. They will be posted to Crowbar HEAD. If you want the current build, we have created a “v1.0” tag.