Tag Archives: Puppet

Starting RackN – Delivering open ops by pulling an OpenCrowbar Bunny out of our hat

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When Dell pulled out from OpenCrowbar last April, I made a commitment to our community to find a way to keep it going.  Since my exit from Dell early in October 2014, that commitment has taken the form of RackN.

Rack N BlackToday, we’re ready to help people run and expand OpenCrowbar (days away from v2.1!). We’re also seeking investment to make the project more “enterprise-ready” and build integrations that extend ready state.

RackN focuses on maintenance and support of OpenCrowbar for ready state physical provisioning.  We will build the community around Crowbar as an open operations core and extend it with a larger set of hardware support and extensions.  We are building partnerships to build application integration (using Chef, Puppet, Salt, etc) and platform workloads (like OpenStack, Hadoop, Ceph, CloudFoundry and Mesos) above ready state.

I’ve talked with hundreds of people about the state of physical data center operations at scale. Frankly, it’s a scary state of affairs: complexity is increasing for physical infrastructure and we’re blurring the lines by adding commodity networking with local agents into the mix.

Making this jumble of stuff work together is not sexy cloud work – I describe it as internet plumbing to non-technical friends.  It’s unforgiving, complex and full of sharp edge conditions; however, people are excited to hear about our hardware abstraction mission because it solves a real pain for operators.

I hope you’ll stay tuned, or even play along, as we continue the Open Ops journey.

Need a physical ops baseline? Crowbar continues to uniquely fill gap

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Robots Everywhere!I’ve been watching to see if other open “bare metal” projects would morph to match the system-level capabilities that we proved in Crowbar v1 and honed in the re-architecture of OpenCrowbar.  The answer appears to be that Crowbar simply takes a broader approach to solving the physical ops repeatably problem.

Crowbar Architect Victor Lowther says “What makes Crowbar a better tool than Cobbler, Razor, or Foreman is that Crowbar has an orchestration engine that can be used to safely and repeatably deploy complex workloads across large numbers of machines. This is different from (and better than, IMO) just being able to hand responsibility off to Chef/Puppet/Salt, because we can manage the entire lifecycle of a machine where Cobbler, Razor and Chef cannot, we can describe how we want workloads configured at a more abstract level than Foreman can, and we do it all using the same API and UI.”

Since we started with a vision of an integrated system to address the “apply-rinse-repeat” cycle; it’s no surprise that Crowbar remains the only open platform that’s managed to crack the complete physical deployment life-cycle.

The Crowbar team realized that it’s not just about automation setting values: physical ops requires orchestration to make sure the values are set in the correct sequence on the appropriate control surface including DNS, DHCP, PXE, Monitoring, et cetera.  Unlike architectures for aaS platforms, the heterogeneous nature of the physical control planes requires a different approach.

We’ve seen that making more and more complex kickstart scripts or golden images is not a sustainable solution.  There is simply too much hardware variation and dependency thrash for operators to collaborate with those tools.  Instead, we’ve found that decomposing the provisioning operations into functional layers with orchestration is much more multi-site repeatable.

Accepting that physical ops (discovered infrastructure) is fundamentally different from cloud ops (created infrastructure) has been critical to architecting platforms that were resilient enough for the heterogeneous infrastructure of data centers.

If we want to start cleaning up physical ops, we need to stop looking at operating system provisioning in isolation and start looking at the full server bring up as just a part of a broader system operation that includes networking, management and operational integration.

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.

Crowbar 2.0 Design Summit Notes (+ open weekly meetings starting)

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I could not be happier with the results Crowbar collaborators and my team at Dell achieved around the 1st Crowbar design summit. We had great discussions and even better participation.

The attendees represented major operating system vendors, configuration management companies, OpenStack hosting companies, OpenStack cloud software providers, OpenStack consultants, OpenStack private cloud users, and (of course) a major infrastructure provider. That’s a very complete cross-section of the cloud community.

I knew from the start that we had too little time and, thankfully, people were tolerant of my need to stop the discussions. In the end, we were able to cover all the planned topics. This was important because all these features are interlocked so discussions were iterative. I was impressed with the level of knowledge at the table and it drove deep discussion. Even so, there are still parts of Crowbar that are confusing (networking, late binding, orchestration, chef coupling) even to collaborators.

In typing up these notes, it becomes even more blindingly obvious that the core features for Crowbar 2 are highly interconnected. That’s no surprise technically; however, it will make the notes harder to follow because of knowledge bootstrapping. You need take time and grok the gestalt and surf the zeitgeist.

Collaboration Invitation: I wanted to remind readers that this summit was just the kick-off for a series of open weekly design (Tuesdays 10am CDT) and coordination (Thursdays 8am CDT) meetings. Everyone is welcome to join in those meetings – information is posted, recorded, folded, spindled and mutilated on the Crowbar 2 wiki page.

These notes are my reflection of the online etherpad notes that were made live during the meeting. I’ve grouped them by design topic.

Introduction

  • Contributors need to sign CLAs
  • We are refactoring Crowbar at this time because we have a collection of interconnected features that could not be decoupled
  • Some items (Database use, Rails3, documentation, process) are not for debate. They are core needs but require little design.
  • There are 5 key topics for the refactor: online mode, networking flexibility, OpenStack pull from source, heterogeneous/multi operating systems, being CDMB agnostic
  • Due to time limits, we have to stop discussions and continue them online.
  • We are hoping to align Crowbar 2 beta and OpenStack Folsom release.

Online / Connected Mode

  • Online mode is more than simply internet connectivity. It is the foundation of how Crowbar stages dependencies and components for deploy. It’s required for heterogeneous O/S, pull from source and it has dependencies on how we model networking so nodes can access resources.
  • We are thinking to use caching proxies to stage resources. This would allow isolated production environments and preserves the run everything from ISO without a connection (that is still a key requirement to us).
  • Suse’s Crowbar fork does not build an ISO, instead it relies on RPM packages for barclamps and their dependencies.
  • Pulling packages directly from the Internet has proven to be unreliable, this method cannot rely on that alone.

Install From Source

  • This feature is mainly focused on OpenStack, it could be applied more generally. The principals that we are looking at could be applied to any application were the source code is changing quickly (all of them?!). Hadoop is an obvious second candidate.
  • We spent some time reviewing the use-cases for this feature. While this appears to be very dev and pre-release focused, there are important applications for production. Specifically, we expect that scale customers will need to run ahead of or slightly adjacent to trunk due to patches or proprietary code. In both cases, it is important that users can deploy from their repository.
  • We discussed briefly our objective to pull configuration from upstream (not just OpenStack, but potentially any common cookbooks/modules). This topic is central to the CMDB agnostic discussion below.
  • The overall sentiment is that this could be a very powerful capability if we can manage to make it work. There is a substantial challenge in tracking dependencies – current RPMs and Debs do a good job of this and other configuration steps beyond just the bits. Replicating that functionality is the real obstacle.

CMDB agnostic (decoupling Chef)

  • This feature is confusing because we are not eliminating the need for a configuration management database (CMDB) tool like Chef, instead we are decoupling Crowbar from the a single CMDB to a pluggable model using an abstraction layer.
  • It was stressed that Crowbar does orchestration – we do not rely on convergence over multiple passes to get the configuration correct.
  • We had strong agreement that the modules should not be tightly coupled but did need a consistent way (API? Consistent namespace? Pixie dust?) to share data between each other. Our priority is to maintain loose coupling and follow integration by convention and best practices rather than rigid structures.
  • The abstraction layer needs to have both import and export functions
  • Crowbar will use attribute injection so that Cookbooks can leverage Crowbar but will not require Crowbar to operate. Crowbar’s database will provide the links between the nodes instead of having to wedge it into the CMDB.
  • In 1.x, the networking was the most coupled into Chef. This is a major part of the refactor and modeling for Crowbar’s database.
  • There are a lot of notes captured about this on the etherpad – I recommend reviewing them

Heterogeneous OS (bare metal provisioning and beyond)

  • This topic was the most divergent of all our topics because most of the participants were using some variant of their own bare metal provisioning project (check the etherpad for the list).
  • Since we can’t pack an unlimited set of stuff on the ISO, this feature requires online mode.
  • Most of these projects do nothing beyond OS provisioning; however, their simplicity is beneficial. Crowbar needs to consider users who just want a stream-lined OS provisioning experience.
  • We discussed Crowbar’s late binding capability, but did not resolve how to reconcile that with these other projects.
  • Critical use cases to consider:
    • an API for provisioning (not sure if it needs to be more than the current one)
    • pick which Operating Systems go on which nodes (potentially with a rules engine?)
    • inventory capabilities of available nodes (like ohai and factor) into a database
    • inventory available operating systems

Four OpenStack Trends from Summit: Practical, Friendly, Effective and Deployable

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With the next OpenStack Austin meetup on Thursday (sponsored by Puppet), I felt like it was past time for me to post my thoughts and observations about the Spring 2012 OpenStack design conference.  This was my fifth OpenStack conference (my notes about Bexar, Cactus, Diablo & Essex).  Every conference has been unique, exciting, and bigger than the previous.

My interest lies in the trend lines of OpenStack.  For details about sessions, I recommend Stefano Maffulli‘s  excellent link aggregation post for the Summit.

1. Technology Trend: Practical with Potential.

OpenStack started with a BIG vision to become the common platform for cloud API and operations.  That vision is very much alive and on-track; however, our enthusiasm for what could be is tempered by the need to build a rock solid foundation.  The drive to stability over feature expansion has had a very positive impact.  I give a lot of credit for this effort to the leadership of the project technical leads (PTLs), Canonical‘s drive to include OpenStack in the 12.04 LTS and the Rackspace Cloud drive to deploy Essex.  My team at Dell has also been part of this trend by focusing so much effort on making OpenStack production deployable (via Crowbar).

Overall, I am seeing a broad-based drive to minimize disruption.

2. Culture Trend: Friendly but some tension.

Companies at both large and small ends of the spectrum are clearly jockeying for position.  I think the market is big enough for everyone; however, we are also bumping into each other.  Overall, we are putting aside these real and imagined differences to focus on enlarging the opportunity of having a true community cloud platform.  For example, the OpenStack Foundation investment formation has moneyed competitors jostling for position to partner together.

However, it’s not just about paying into the club; OpenStack’s history is clearly about execution.  Looking back to the original Austin Summit sponsors, we’ve clearly seen that intent and commitment are different.

3. Discussion Trend: Small Groups Effective

The depth & quality of discussions inside sessions was highly variable.  Generally, I saw that large group discussions stayed at a very high level.  The smaller sessions required deep knowledge of the code to participate and seemed more productive.  We continue to have a juggle between discussions that are conceptual or require detailed knowledge of the code.  If conceptual, it’s too far removed.  If code, it becomes inaccessible to many people.

This has happened at each Summit and I now accept that it is natural.  We are using vision sessions to ensure consensus and working sessions to coordinate deliverables for the release.

I cannot over emphasize importance of small groups and delivery driven execution interactions: I spent most of my time in small group discussions with partners aligning efforts.

4. Deployment Trend: Testing and Upstreams matter

Operations for deploying OpenStack is a substantial topic at the Summit.  I find that to be a significant benefit to the community because there are a large block of us who were vocal advocates for deployability at the very formation of the project.

From my perspective at Dell, we are proud to see that wide spread acknowledgement of our open source contribution, Crowbar, as the most prominent OpenStack deployer.   Our efforts at making OpenStack installable are recognized as a contribution; however, we’re also getting feedback that we need to streamline and simplify Crowbar.  We also surprised to hear that Crowbar is “opinionated.”   On reflection, I agree (and am proud) of this assessment because it matches best practice coding styles.  Since our opinions also drive our test matrix there is a significant value for our OpenStack deployment is that we spend a lot of time testing (automated and manual) our preferred install process.

There’s a push to reconcile the various Chef OpenStack cookbooks into a single upstream.  This seems like a very good idea because it will allow various parties to collaborate on open operations.  The community needs leadership from Opscode to make this happen.  It appears that Puppet Labs is interested in playing a similar role for Puppet modules but these are still emerging and have not had a chance to fragment.

No matter which path we take, the deployment scripts are only as good as their level of testing.   Unreliable deployment scripts have are less than worthless.

OpenStack Deployments Abound at Austin Meetup (12/9)

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I was very impressed by the quality of discussion at the Deployment topic meeting for Austin OpenStack Meetup (#OSATX). Of the 45ish people attending, we had representations for at least 6 different OpenStack deployments (Dell, HP, ATT, Rackspace Internal, Rackspace Cloud Builders, Opscode Chef)!  Considering the scope of those deployments (several are aiming at 1000+ nodes), that’s a truly impressive accomplishment for such a young project.

Even with the depth of the discussion (notes below), we did not go into details on how individual OpenStack components are connected together.  The image my team at Dell uses is included below.  I also recommend reviewing Rackspace’s published reference architecture.

Figure 1 Diablo Software Architecture. Source Dell/OpenStack (cc w/ attribution)

Notes

Our deployment discussion was a round table so it is difficult to link statements back to individuals, but I was able to track companies (mostly).

  • HP
    • picked Ubuntu & KVM because they were the most vetted. They are also using Chef for deployment.
    • running Diablo 2, moving to Diablo Final & a flat network model. The network controller is a bottleneck. Their biggest scale issue is RabbitMQ.
    • is creating their own Nova Volume plugin for their block storage.
    • At this point, scale limits are due to simultaneous loading rather than total number of nodes.
    • The Nova node image cache can get corrupted without any notification or way to force a refresh – this defect is being addressed in Essex.
    • has setup availability zones are completely independent (500 node) systems. Expecting to converge them in the future.
  • Rackspace
    • is using the latest Ubuntu. Always stays current.
    • using Puppet to setup their cloud.
    • They are expecting to go live on Essex and are keeping their deployment on the Essex trunk. This is causing some extra work but they expect it to pay back by allowing them to get to production on Essex faster.
    • Deploying on XenServer
    • “Devs move fast, Ops not so much.”  Trying to not get behind.
  • Rackspace Cloud Builders (RCB) is running major releases being run through an automated test suite. The verified releases are being published to https://github.com/cloudbuilders (note: Crowbar is pulling our OpenStack bits from this repo).
  • Dell commented that our customers are using Crowbar primarily pilots – they are learning how to use OpenStack
    • Said they have >10 customer deployments pending
    • ATT is using OpenSource version of Crowbar
    • Need for Keystone and Dashboard were considered essential additions to Diablo
  • Hypervisors
    • KVM is considered the top one for now
    • Libvirt (which uses KVM) also supports LXE which people found to be interesting
    • XenServer via XAPI are also popular
    • No so much activity on ESX & HyperV
    • We talked about why some hypervisors are more popular – it’s about the node agent architecture of OpenStack.
  • Storage
    • NetApp via Nova Volume appears to be a popular block storage
  • Keystone / Dashboard
    • Customers want both together
    • Including keystone/dashboard was considered essential in Diablo. It was part of the reason why Diablo Final was delayed.
    • HP is not using dashboard
OpenStack API
  • Members of the Audience made comments that we need to deprecate the EC2 APIs (because it does not help OpenStack long term to maintain EC2 APIs over its own).  [1/5 Note: THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL POLICY, it is a reflection of what was discussed]
  • HP started on EC2 API but is moving to the OpenStack API

Meetup Housekeeping

  • Next meeting is Tuesday 1/10 and sponsored by SUSE (note: Tuesday is just for this January).  Topic TBD.
  • We’ve got sponsors for the next SIX meetups! Thanks for Dell (my employeer), Rackspace, HP, SUSE, Canonical and PuppetLabs for sponsoring.
  • We discussed topics for the next meetings (see the post image). We’re going to throw it to a vote for guidance.
  • The OSATX tag is also being used by Occupy San Antonio.  Enjoy the cross chatter!

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…

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