Tag Archives: essex

Crowbar releases for OpenStack Essex and Folsom

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On the eve of the OpenStack design summit, it’s worth noting that the Crowbar team at Dell cut our final Essex release (aka Betty) last week. We’ve also committed the initial Folsom deployment scripts to the 1x development trunk under “feature/folsom” if you are doing Crowbar builds from DevTool (see bit.ly/crowbardevtool).

If you don’t want to build it, I’ve cut ISOs from the open source bits and posted them to http://crowbar.zehicle.com.

Andi Abes is presenting about the new Pull From Source (pfs) feature at the Summit on Monday. There’s a feature branch for that too and I’m going to check with him and try to post and ISO for that too.

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OpenStack Deploy Day generates lots of interest, less coding

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Last week, my team at Dell led a world-wide OpenStack Essex Deploy event. Kamesh Pemmaraju, our OpenStack-powered solution product manager, did a great summary of the event results (200+ attendees!). What started as a hack-a-thon for deploy scripts morphed into a stunning 14+ hour event with rotating intro content and an ecosystem showcase (videos).  Special kudos to Kamesh, Andi Abes, Judd Maltin, Randy Perryman & Mike Pittaro for leadership at our regional sites.

Clearly, OpenStack is attracting a lot of interest. We’ve been investing time in content to help people who are curious about OpenStack to get started.

While I’m happy to be fueling the OpenStack fervor with an easy on-ramp, our primary objective for the Deploy Day was to collaborate on OpenStack deployments.

On that measure, we have room for improvement. We had some great discussions about how to handle upgrades and market drivers for OpenStack; however, we did not spend the time improving Essex deployments that I was hoping to achieve. I know it’s possible – I’ve talked with developers in the Crowbar community who want this.

If you wanted more expert interaction, here are some of my thoughts for future events.

  • Expert track did not get to deploy coding. I think that we need to simply focus more even tightly on to Crowbar deployments. That means having a Crowbar Hack with an OpenStack focus instead of vice versa.
  • Efforts to serve OpenStack n00bs did not protect time for experts. If we offer expert sessions then we won’t try to have parallel intro sessions. We’ll simply have to direct novices to the homework pages and videos.
  • Combining on-site and on-line is too confusing. As much as I enjoy meeting people face-to-face, I think we’d have a more skilled audience if we kept it online only.
  • Connectivity! Dropped connections, sigh.
  • Better planning for videos (not by the presenters) to make sure that we have good results on the expert track.
  • This event was too long. It’s just not practical to serve Europe, US and Asia in a single event. I think that 2-3 hours is a much more practical maximum. 10-12am Eastern or 6-8pm Pacific would be much more manageable.

Do you have other comments and suggestions? Please let me know!

OSED OMG: OpenStack Essex Deploy Day!! A day-long four-session two-track International Online Conference

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Curious about OpenStack? Know it, but want to tune your Ops chops? JOIN US on Thursday 5/31 (or Friday 6/1 if you are in Asia)!

Already know the event logistics? Skip back to my OSED observations post.

Some important general notes:

  1. We are RECORDING everything and will link posts from the event page.
  2. There is HOMEWORK if you want to get ahead by installing OpenStack yourself.
  3. For last minute updates about the event, I recommend that you join the Crowbar Listserver.

Content Logistics work like this.

  1. Everything will be available ONLINE. We are also coordinating many physical sites as rally points.
  2. Introductory: FOUR 3-hour sessions for people who do not have OpenStack or Crowbar experience. These sessions will show how to install OpenStack using Crowbar, discuss DevOps and showcase companies that are in the OpenStack ecosystem. They are planned to have 2 European slots (afternoon & evening), 3 US slots (morning, afternoon & evening), and 1 Asian slot (morning).
  3. Expert: ON-GOING deep technical sessions for engineers who have OpenStack and/or Crowbar experience. There will be one main screen and voice channel in which we are planning to highlight and discuss these topics in blocks throughout the day. We have a long list of topics to discuss and will maintain an ongoing Google Hangout for each topic. Depending on interest, we will jump back and forth to different hangouts.

Intro/Overview Session Logistics work like this

We’re planning FOUR introductory sessions throughout the day (read ahead?). Each session should be approximately 3 hours. The first hour of the sessions will be about OpenStack Essex and installing it using Crowbar. After some Q&A, we’re going to highlight the OpenStack ecosystem. The schedule for the ecosystem is in flux and will likely shift even during the event.

The Session start times for Overview & Ecosystem content

Region EDT Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4
Europe (-5) -5 3pm 6pm * *
Americas Eastern 0 10am 1pm 4pm *
Americas Central +1 9am Noon 3pm *
Americas Mtn +2 * 11am 2pm 7pm
Americas West +3 * 10am 1pm 6pm
Asia (Toyko) +10 * * * 6/1 10 am

* There are no planned live venues at this time/region. You are always welcome to join online!

Experts Track Logistics

Note: we expect experts to have already installed OpenStack (see homework page). Ideally, an expert has already setup a build environment.

We have a list of topics (Essex, Quantum, Networking, Pull from Source, Documentation, etc) that we plan to cover on a 30-60 minute rotation.

We will cover the OpenStack Essex deploy at the start of each planned session (9am, Noon, 3pm & 8pm EDT). Before we cover the OpenStack deploy, we’ll spend 10 minutes setting (and posting) the agenda for the next three hours based on attendee input.

Even if we are not talking about a topic on the main channel, we will keep a dialog going on topic specific Google hangouts. The links to the hangouts will be posted with the Expert track agenda.

Asia-Pac Session for OpenStack Essex Global Deploy day

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I did not want us to neglect Asia-Pac for the upcoming OpenStack Deploy day, so I was delighted when Mike Pittaro offered to help host the online content for the last session. Mike is an OpenStack contributor who recently joined my team at Dell.

This addresses the concern that our first Essex hack day was America’s daytime only so it was difficult for time zones east of GMT to participate.

We are working with Dell teams in Asia-Pac to setup more information to support Japan, China, Korea and Australia.

This picture, taken by Dan Choquette (my team too!), is from Toyko DevOpsDays.

Join us 5/31 for a OpenStack Deploy Hack-a-thon (all-day, world-wide online & multi-city)

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An OpenStack Deploy Hack-a-thon is like 3-liter bottle of distilled open source community love.  Do you want direct access to my Dell team of OpenStack/Crowbar/Hadoop engineers?  Are you just getting started and want training about OpenStack and DevOps?  This is the event for you!

Here’s the official overview:

The OpenStack Deploy hack-a-thon focuses on automation for deploying OpenStack Essex with Dell Crowbar and Opscode Chef. This is a day-long, world-wide event bringing together developers, operators, users, ecosystem vendors and the open source cloud curious. (read below: We are looking for global sites and leaders to extend the event hours!)

OpenStack is the fastest growing open source cloud infrastructure project with broad market adoption from major hardware and software vendors. Crowbar is an Apache 2 licensed, open infrastructure deployment tool and is one of the leading multi-node deployers for OpenStack and Hadoop.

Learn first-hand how OpenStack and Crowbar can make it easy to deploy and operate your own cloud environments.

The Deploy day will offer two individual parallel tracks with something for both experts and beginners:

  • Newbies n00bs will learn the basics of OpenStack, Crowbar and DevOps and how they can benefit your organization. We’ll also have time for ecosystem vendors to discuss how they are leveraging OpenStack.
  • Experts l33ts will take a deep dive into new features of OpenStack Essex and Crowbar, and learn how Crowbar works under the hood, which will enable them to extend the product using Crowbar Barclamps.
Note: If you’re a n00b but want l33t content, we’ll be offering online training materials and videos to help get you up to speed.

Why now? We’ve validated our OpenStack Essex deployment against the latest release bits from Ubuntu. Now it’s time to reach out to the OpenStack and Crowbar communities for training, testing and collaborative development.

Join the event!  We’re organizing information on the Crowbar wiki.  (I highly recommend you join the Crowbar list to get access to support for prep materials).  You can also reach out to me via the @DellCrowbar handle.

We’d love to get you up to speed on the basics and dive deep into the core.

Hungry for Operational Excellence? ChefConf 2012 satisfies!

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Since my team at Dell sponsored the inaugural ChefConf, we had the good fortune to get a handful of passes and show up at the event in force.  I was also tapped for a presentation (Chef+Crowbar gets Physical+OpenStack Cloud) and Ignite session (Crowbar history).

I live demo’ed using a single command window with knife to manage both physical and cloud infrastructure.    That’s freaking cool!  (and thanks to Matt Ray for helping to get this working)

It’s no surprise that I’m already a DevOps advocate and Opscode enthusiast, there were aspects of the conference that are worth reiterating:

  • Opscode is part of the cadre of leaders redefining how we operate infrastructure.  The energy is amazing.
  • The acknowledgement of the “snowflake” challenge where all Ops environments are alike, but no two are the same.
  • A tight integration between Operations and lean delivery because waterfall deployments are not sustainable
  • Opscode’s vision is rooted in utility.  You can be successful without design and then excel when you add it.  I find that refreshing.
  • There was a fun, friendly (“hug driven development?!”) and laid back vibe.  This group laughed A LOT.
  • For a first conference, Opscode did a good job with logistics and organization.
  • I saw that the back rooms and hallways are buzzing with activity.  This means that people are making money with the technology.

Crowbar + Chef installs & manages OpenStack Essex (Live Demo, 45 minutes):

 

Ignite Talk about Dell Crowbar History (5 minutes)

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.

OpenStack Austin: What we’d like to see at the Design Summit

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Last week, the OpenStack Austin user group discussed what we’d like to see at the upcoming OpenStack Design Summit. We had a strong turnout (48?!).

  1. To get the meeting started, Marc Padovani from HP (this month’s sponsor) provided some lessons learned from the HP OpenStack-Powered Cloud. While Marc noted that HP has not been able to share much of their development work on OpenStack; he was able to show performance metrics relating to a fix that HP contributed back to the OpenStack community. The defect related to the scheduler’s ability to handle load. The pre-fix data showed a climb and then a gap where the scheduler simply stopped responding. Post-fix, the performance curve is flat without any “dead zones.” (sharing data like this is what I call “open operations“)
  2. Next, I (Rob Hirschfeld) gave a brief overview of the OpenStack Essex Deploy Day (my summary) that Dell coordinated with world-wide participation. The Austin deploy day location was in the same room as the meetup so several of the OSEDD participants were still around.
  3. The meat of the meetup was a freeform discussion about what the group would like to see discussed at the Design Summit. My objective for the discussion was that the Austin OpenStack community could have a broader voice is we showed consensus for certain topics in advance of the meeting.

At Jim Plamondon‘s suggestion, we captured our brain storming on the OpenStack etherpad. The Etherpad is super cool – it allows simultaneous editing by multiple parties, so the notes below were crowd sourced during the meeting as we discussed topics that we’d like to see highlighted at the conference. The etherpad preserves editors, but I removed the highlights for clarity.

The next step is for me to consolidate the list into a voting page and ask the membership to rank the items (poll online!) below.

Brain storm results (unedited)

Stablity vs. Features

API vs. Code

  • What is the measurable feature set?
  • Is it an API, or an implementation?
  • Is the Foundation a formal-ish standards body?
  • Imagine the late end-game: can Azure/VMWare adopt OPenStack’s APIs and data formats to deliver interop, without running OpenStack’s code? Is this good? Are there conversations on displacing incumbents and spurring new adoption?
  • Logo issues

Documentation Standards

  • Dev docs vs user docs
  • Lag of update/fragmentation (10 blogs, 10 different methods, 2 “work”)
  • Per release getting started guide validated and available prior or at release.

Operations Focus

  • Error messages and codes vs python stack traces
  • Alternatively put, “how can we make error messages more ops-friendly, without making them less developer-friendly?”
  • Upgrade and operations of rolling updates and upgrades. Hot migrations?

If OpenStack was installable on Windows/Hyper-V as a simple MSI/Service installer – would you try it as a node?

  • Yes.

Is Nova too big?  How does it get fixed?

  • libraries?
  • sections?
  • make it smaller sub-projects
  • shorter release cycles?

nova-volume

  • volume split out?
  • volume expansion of backend storage systems
  • Is nova-volume the canonical control plane for storage provisioning?  Regardless of transport? It presently deals in block devices only… is the following blueprint correctly targeted to nova-volume?

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/filedriver

Orchestration

  • Is the Donabe project dead?

Discussion about invitations to Summit

  • What is a contribution that warrants an invitation
  • Look at Launchpad’s Karma system, which confers karma for many different “contributory” acts, including bug fixes and doc fixes, in addition to code commitments

Summit Discussions

  • Is there a time for an operations summit?
  • How about an operators’ track?
  • Just a note: forums.openstack.org for users/operators to drive/show need and participation.

How can we capture the implicit knowledge (of mailing list and IRC content) in explicit content (documentation, forums, wiki, stackexchange, etc.)?

Hypervisors: room for discussion?

  • Do we want hypervisor featrure parity?
  • From the cloud-app developer’s perspective, I want to “write once, run anywhere,” and if hypervisor features preclude that (by having incompatible VM images, foe example)
  • (RobH: But “write once, run anywhere” [WORA] didn’t work for Java, right?)
  • (JimP: Yeah, but I was one of Microsoft’s anti-Java evangelists, when we were actively preventing it from working — so I know the dirty tricks vendors can use to hurt WORA in OpenStack, and how to prevent those trick from working.)

CDMI

Swift API is an evolving de facto open alternative to S3… CDMI is SNIA standards track.  Should Swift API become CDMI compliant?  Should CDMI exist as a shim… a la the S3 stuff.

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day: First Steps to Production

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One March 8th, 70 people from around the world gathered on the Crowbar IM channel to begin building a production grade OpenStack Essex deployment. The event was coordinated as meet-ups by the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team (my team) in two physical locations: the Nokia offices in Boston and the TechRanch in Austin.

My objective was to enable the community to begin collaboration on Essex Deployment. At that goal, we succeeded beyond my expectations.

IMHO, the top challenge for OpenStack Essex is to build a community of deploying advocates. We have a strong and dynamic development community adding features to the project. Now it is time for us to build a comparable community of deployers. By providing a repeatable, shared and open foundation for OpenStack deployments, we create a baseline that allows collaboration and co-development. Not only must we make deployments easy and predictable, we must also ensure they are scalable and production ready.

Having solid open production deployment infrastructure drives OpenStack adoption.

Our goal on the 8th was not to deliver finished deployments; it was to the start of Essex deployment community collaboration. To ensure that we could focus on getting to an Essex baseline, our team invested substantial time before the event to make sure that participants had a working Essex reference deployment.

By the nature of my team’s event leadership and our approach to OpenStack, the event was decidedly Crowbar focused. I feel like this is an acceptable compromise because Crowbar is open and provides a repeatable foundation. If everyone has the same foundation then we can focus on the truly critical challenges of ensuring consistent OpenStack deployments. Even using Crowbar, we waste a lot of time trying to figure out the differences between configurations. Lack of baseline consistency seriously impedes collaboration.

The fastest way to collaborate on OpenStack deployment is to have a reference deployment as a foundation.

Success By The Numbers

This was a truly international community collaborative event. Here are some of the companies that participated:

Dell (sponsor), Nokia (sponsor), Rackspace, Opscode, Canonical, Fedora, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Nicira, Enstratus, Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Purdue University, Orbital Software Solutions, XepCloud and others.

PLEASE COMMENT here if I missed your company and I will add it to the list.

On the day of the event, we collected the following statistics:

  • 70 people on Skype IM channel (it’s not too late to join by pinging DellCrowbar with “Essex barclamps”).
  • 14+ companies
  • 2 physical sites with 10-15 people at each
  • 4 fold increase in traffic on the Crowbar Github to 813 hits.
  • 66 downloads of the Deploy day ISO
  • 8 videos capture from deploy day sessions.
  • World-wide participation

For over 70 people to spend a day together at this early stage in deployment is a truly impressive indication of the excitement that is building around OpenStack.

Improvements for Next Deploy Day

This was a first time that Andi Abes (Boston event lead), Rob Hirschfeld (Austin event lead) or Jean-Marie Martini (Dell event lead) had ever coordinated an event like this. We owe much of the success to efforts by Greg Althaus, Victor Lowther and the Canonical 12.04/Essex team before the event. Also, having physical sites was very helpful.

We are planning to do another event, so we are carefully tracking ways to improve.

Here are some issues we are tracking.

  • Issues with setting up a screen and voice share that could handle 70 people.
  • Lack of test & documentation on Crowbar meant too much time focused on Crowbar
  • Connectivity issues distributed voice
  • Should have started with DevStack as a baseline
  • more welcome in the comments!

Thank you!

I want to thank everyone who participated in making this event a huge success!

OpenStack Essex Deploy Day 3/8 – Get involved and install with us

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My team at Dell has been avidly tracking the ups, downs, and breakthroughs of the OpenStack Essex release.  While we still have a few milestones before the release is cut, we felt like the E4 release was a good time to begin the work on Essex deployment.  Of course, the final deployment scripts will need substantial baking time after the final release on April 5th; however, getting deployments working will help influence the quality efforts and expand the base of possible testers.

To rally behind Essex Deployments, we are hosting a public work day on Thursday March 8th.

For this work day, we’ll be hosting all-day community events online and physically in Austin and Boston.  We are getting commitments from other Dell teams, partners and customers around the world to collaborate.  The day is promising to deliver some real Essex excitement.

The purpose of these events is to deliver the core of a working OpenStack Essex deployment.  While my team is primarily focused on deploys via Crowbar/Chef, we are encouraging anyone interested in laying down OpenStack Essex to participate.  We will be actively engaged on the OpenStack IRC and mailing lists too.

We have experts in OpenStack, Chef, Crowbar and Operating Systems (Canonical, SUSE, and RHEL) engaged in these activities.

This is a great time to start learning about OpenStack (or Crowbar) with hands-on work.  We are investing substantial upfront time (checkout out the Crowbar wiki for details) to ensure that there is a working base OpenStack Essex deploy on Ubuntu 12.04 beta.  This deploy includes the Crowbar 1.3 beta with some new features specifically designed to make testing faster and easier than ever before.

In the next few days, I’ll cut a 12.04 ISO and OpenStack Barclamp TARs as the basis for the deploy day event.  I’ll also be creating videos that help you quickly get a test lab up and running.  Visit the wiki or meetup sites to register and stay tuned for details!