Tag Archives: DevStack

How do platforms die? One step at a time [the Fidelity Gap]

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The RackN team is working on the “Start to Scale” position for Digital Rebar that targets the IT industry-wide “fidelity gap” problem.  When we started on the Digital Rebar journey back in 2011 with Crowbar, we focused on “last mile” problems in metal and operations.  Only in the last few months did we recognize the importance of automating smaller “first mile” desktop and lab environments.

A fidelityFidelity Gap gap is created when work done on one platform, a developer laptop, does not translate faithfully to the next platform, a QA lab.   Since there are gaps at each stage of deployment, we end up with the ops staircase of despair.

These gaps hide defects until they are expensive to fix and make it hard to share improvements.  Even worse, they keep teams from collaborating.

With everyone trying out Container Orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesosphere or Cloud Foundry (all of which we deploy, btw), it’s important that we can gracefully scale operational best practices.

For companies implementing containers, it’s not just about turning their apps into microservice-enabled immutable-rock stars: they also need to figure out how to implement the underlying platforms at scale.

My example of fidelity gap harm is OpenStack’s “all in one, single node” DevStack.  There is no useful single system OpenStack deployment; however, that is the primary system for developers and automated testing.  This design hides production defects and usability issues from developers.  These are issues that would be exposed quickly if the community required multi-instance development.  Even worse, it keeps developers from dealing with operational consequences of their decisions.

What are we doing about fidelity gaps?  We’ve made it possible to run and faithfully provision multi-node systems in Digital Rebar on a relatively light system (16 Gb RAM, 4 cores) using VMs or containers.  That system can then be fully automated with Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Salt.  Because of our abstractions, if deployment works in Digital Rebar then it can scale up to 100s of physical nodes.

My take away?  If you want to get to scale, start with the end in mind.

We need an OpenStack Reference Deployment (My objectives for Deploy Day)

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I’m overwhelmed and humbled by the enthusiasm my team at Dell is seeing for the OpenStack Essex Deploy day on 5/31 (or 6/1 for Asia). What started as a day for our engineers to hack on Essex Cookbooks with a few fellow Crowbarians has morphed into an international OpenStack event spanning Europe, Americas & Asia.

If you want to read more about the event, check out my event logistics post (link pending).

I do not apologize for my promotion of the Dell-lead open source Crowbar as the deployment tool for the OpenStack Essex Deploy. For a community to focus on improving deployment tooling, there must be a stable reference infrastructure. Crowbar provides a fast and repeatable multi-node environment with scriptable networking and packaging.

I believe that OpenStack benefits from a repeatable multi-node reference deployment. I’ll go further and state that this requires DevOps tooling to ensure consistency both within and between deployments.

DevStack makes trunk development more canonical between different developers. I hope that Crowbar will help provide a similar experience for operators so that we can truly share deployment experience and troubleshooting. I think it’s already realistic for Crowbar deployments to a repeatable enough deployment that they provide a reference for defect documentation and reproduction.

Said more plainly, it’s a good thing if a lot of us use OpenStack in the same way so that we can help each out.

My team’s choice to accelerate releasing the Crowbar barclamps for OpenStack Essex makes perfect sense if you accept our rationale for creating a community baseline deployment.

Crowbar is Dell-lead, not Dell specific.

One of the reasons that Crowbar is open source and we do our work in the open (yes, you can see our daily development in github) is make it safe for everyone to invest in a shared deployment strategy. We encourage and welcome community participation.

PS: I believe the same is true for any large scale software project. Watch out for similar activity around Apache Hadoop as part of our collaboration with Cloudera!

OpenStack Meetup 4/12: Austin at Summit, DevStack Essex

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Austin Stackers!  This Thursday is our April meetup at the Austin TechRanch.

Please RSVP so that we know how much food to get!  SUSE is this Month’s sponsor for food and my team at Dell continues to pickup the room rental.  We have 35 RSVPs as of Monday noon – this will be another popular meeting (last meeting minutes).

Topics for the meetup are:

With the Summit next week, I think it is very important that we pre-discuss Summit topics and priorities as a community.  It will help us be more productive individually and for our collective interests when we engage the larger community next week.

Austin OpenStack Meetup (January Minutes) + OpenStack Foundation Web Cast!

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Sorry for the brevity… At the last Austin OpenStack meetup, we had >60 stackers!  Some from as far away as Portland and Boston (as in Oregon and Massachusetts).

Notes:

  • Suse introduced their OpenStack beta and talked about their Suse Studio that can deploy images against the OpenStack APIs
  • I showed off DevStack.org code that can setup the truck of OpenStack (now Essex) in about 10 minutes on a single node.  Great for developers!
  • I showed an OpenStack Diablo Final deployment from Crowbar.  I focused mainly on Dashboard and used our reference architecture (see below) as illustration of the many parts.
  • Matt Ray suggested everyone watch the webcasts about the OpenStack Foundation (Thurs 6pm central  & Friday 9am central)
  • We planned the next few meetups.
    • For February, we’ll talk about Swift and Dashboard.
    • For March, we’ll talk about Essex and DevStack to prep for the next design summit (in SF).
    • For April, we’ll debrief the conference

Thank you Suse and Dell (my employer) for sponsoring!   The next meetup is sponsored by Canonical.

January OpenStack Meetup next Tuesday 1/10 focus on Operation/Install

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A reminder that we’re having an OpenStack meetup in Austin next Tuesday (http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/44184682/).

We’ll have OpenStack fellow-up and general topics including planning our next meeting.

The primary topic for this meeting is Operating OpenStack.  According to the group poll, the plan is to show an hands on OpenStack installation and peel back the covers on configuration.

I’m expecting to use Dell’s Crowbar tool to setup the Rackspace cloud builder distro.  I’m hoping that someone can also show DevStack and some other installations.

It’s not too late to vote: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/polls/444322/

Thanks to Suse and Dell for sponsoring!

Note: If you’re the Boston Area, the next meetup there is 2/1

Details: http://www.foggysoftware.com/2011/12/openstack-in-community.html

February 1, 2012 at 6:30PM EST
Boston OpenStack User Group Meetup
Harvard University, Maxwell Dworkin Building, Rm 119, 33 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA

To register: http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Boston/