We’ve been so busy working on getting RHEL support ready to drop into the Crowbar repos that I have not had time to post about what’s coming next for Crowbar. The RHEL addition has required a substantial amount of work to accommodate different packaging models and capabilities. This change moves Crowbar closer to being able allow nodes’ operating systems (the allocated TFTP Boot Image) to be unique per node.

I will post more forward looking details soon but wanted to prime the pump and invite suggestions from our community.

We are tracking two major features for delivery by the OpenStack October Design Conference

1. OpenStack Diablo Barclamps. Expect to see individual barclamps for various components like Keystone, Dashboard, Glace, Nova, Swift, etc)
2. Barclamp versioning / connected imports. This feature will enable Crowbar to pull in the latest components for barclamps from remote repositories. I consider this a critical feature for Crowbar’s core DevOps/CloudOps capabilities and to support more community development for barclamps.

We are also working on some UI enhancements

• Merging together the barclamps/proposals/active views into a single view
• Enabling bulk actions for nodes (description, BIOS types, and allocate)
• Allowing users to set node names and showing the names throughout the UI
• More clarity on state of proposal application process (stretch goal)

I am planning to post more about our design ideas as work begins.

If you want to help with Diablo barclamps, these will be worked in the open and we’d be happy to collaborate. We’re also open to suggestion for what’s next.