Tag Archives: Ready State

Delicious 7 Layer DIP (DevOps Infrastructure Provisioning) model with graphic!

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Applying architecture and computer science principles to infrastructure automation helps us build better controls.  In this post, we create an OSI-like model that helps decompose the ops environment.

The RackN team discussions about “what is Ready State” have led to some interesting realizations about physical ops.  One of the most critical has been splitting the operational configuration (DNS, NTP, SSH Keys, Monitoring, Security, etc) from the application configuration.

Interactions between these layers is much more dynamic than developers and operators expect.  

In cloud deployments, you can use ask for the virtual infrastructure to be configured in advance via the IaaS and/or golden base images.  In hardware, the environment build up needs to be more incremental because that variations in physical infrastructure and operations have to be accommodated.

Greg Althaus, Crowbar co-founder, and I put together this 7 layer model (it started as 3 and grew) because we needed to be more specific in discussion about provisioning and upgrade activity.  The system view helps explain how layer 5 and 6 operate at the system layer.

7 Layer DIP

The Seven Layers of our DIP:

  1. shared infrastructure – the base layer is about the interconnects between the nodes.  In this model, we care about the specific linkage to the node: VLAN tags on the switch port, which switch is connected, which PDU ID controls turns it on.
  2. firmware and management – nodes have substantial driver (RAID/BIOS/IPMI) software below the operating system that must be configured correctly.   In some cases, these configurations have external interfaces (BMC) that require out-of-band access while others can only be configured in pre-install environments (I call that side-band).
  3. operating system – while the operating system is critical, operators are striving to keep this layer as thin to avoid overhead.  Even so, there are critical security, networking and device mapping functions that must be configured.  Critical local resource management items like mapping media or building network teams and bridges are level 2 functions.
  4. operations clients – this layer connects the node to the logical data center infrastructure is basic ways like time synch (NTP) and name resolution (DNS).  It’s also where more sophisticated operators configure things like distributed cache, centralized logging and system health monitoring.  CMDB agents like Chef, Puppet or Saltstack are installed at the “top” of this layer to complete ready state.
  5. applications – once all the baseline is setup, this is the unique workload.  It can range from platforms for other applications (like OpenStack or Kubernetes) or the software itself like Ceph, Hadoop or anything.
  6. operations management – the external system references for layer 3 must be factored into the operations model because they often require synchronized configuration.  For example, registering a server name and IP addresses in a DNS, updating an inventory database or adding it’s thresholds to a monitoring infrastructure.  For scale and security, it is critical to keep the node configuration (layer 3) constantly synchronized with the central management systems.
  7. cluster coordination – no application stands alone; consequently, actions from layer 4 nodes must be coordinated with other nodes.  This ranges from database registration and load balancing to complex upgrades with live data migration. Working in layer 4 without layer 6 coordination creates unmanageable infrastructure.

This seven layer operations model helps us discuss which actions are required when provisioning a scale infrastructure.  In my experience, many developers want to work exclusively in layer 4 and overlook the need to have a consistent and managed infrastructure in all the other layers.  We enable this thinking in cloud and platform as a service (PaaS) and that helps improve developer productivity.

We cannot overlook the other layers in physical ops; however, working to ready state helps us create more cloud-like boundaries.  Those boundaries are a natural segue my upcoming post about functional operations (older efforts here).

Ironic + Crowbar: United in Vision, Complementary in Approach

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This post is co-authored by Devanda van der Veen, OpenStack Ironic PTL, and Rob Hirschfeld, OpenCrowbar Founder.  We discuss how Ironic and Crowbar work together today and into the future.

Normalizing the APIs for hardware configuration is a noble and long-term goal.  While the end result, a configured server, is very easy to describe; the differences between vendors’ hardware configuration tools are substantial.  These differences make it impossible challenging to create repeatable operations automation (DevOps) on heterogeneous infrastructure.

Illustration to show potential changes in provisioning control flow over time.

Illustration to show potential changes in provisioning control flow over time.

The OpenStack Ironic project is a multi-vendor community solution to this problem at the server level.  By providing a common API for server provisioning, Ironic encourages vendors to write drivers for their individual tooling such as iDRAC for Dell or iLO for HP.

Ironic abstracts configuration and expects to be driven by an orchestration system that makes the decisions of how to configure each server. That type of orchestration is the heart of Crowbar physical ops magic [side node: 5 ways that physical ops is different from cloud]

The OpenCrowbar project created extensible orchestration to solve this problem at the system level.  By decomposing system configuration into isolated functional actions, Crowbar can coordinate disparate configuration actions for servers, switches and between systems.

Today, the Provisioner component of Crowbar performs similar functions as Ironic for operating system installation and image lay down.  Since configuration activity is tightly coupled with other Crowbar configuration, discovery and networking setup, it is difficult to isolate in the current code base.  As Ironic progresses, it should be possible to shift these activities from the Provisioner to Ironic and take advantage of the community-based configuration drivers.

The immediate synergy between Crowbar and Ironic comes from accepting two modes of operation for OpenStack: bootstrapping infrastructure and multi-tenant server allocation.

Crowbar was designed as an operational platform that seeds an OpenStack ready environment.  Once that environment is configured, OpenStack can take over ownership of the resources and allow Ironic to manage and deliver “hypervisor-free” servers for each tenant.  In that way, we can accelerate the adoption of OpenStack for self-service metal.

Physical operations is messy and challenging, but we’re committed to working together to make it suck less.  Operators of the world unite!

why is hardware hard? Ready State Physical Ops Meetup on Tuesday 12/2 9am PT

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meh.  Compared to cloud, Ops on physical infrastructure sinks.physical outlet

Unfortunately, the cloud and scale platforms need to run someone so someone’s got to deal with it.  In fact, we’ve got to deal with crates of cranky servers and flocks of finicky platforms.  It’s enough to keep a good operator down.

If that’s you, or someone you care about, join us for a physical ops support group meetup on Tuesday 9am PT (11 central).

There is a light at the end of the tunnel!  We can make it repeatable to provision OpenStack, Hadoop and other platforms.

As a community, we’re steadily bringing best practices and proven automation from cloud ops down into the physical space.   On the OpenCrowbar project, we’re accelerating this effort using the ready state concept as a hand off point for “physical-cloud equivalency” and exploring the concept of “functional operations” to make DevOps scripts more portable.

Join me and Rafael Knuth for a discussion about how operators can work together to break the cycle.

To thrive, OpenStack must better balance dev, ops and business needs.

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OpenStack has grown dramatically in many ways but we have failed to integrate development, operations and business communities in a balanced way.

My most urgent observation from Paris is that these three critical parts of the community are having vastly different dialogs about OpenStack.

Clouds DownAt the Conference, business people were talking were about core, stability and utility while the developers were talking about features, reorganizing and expanding projects. The operators, unfortunately segregated in a different location, were trying to figure out how to share best practices and tools.

Much of this structural divergence was intentional and should be (re)evaluated as we grow.

OpenStack events are split into distinct focus areas: the conference for business people, the summit for developers and specialized days for operators. While this design serves a purpose, the community needs to be taking extra steps to ensure communication. Without that communication, corporate sponsors and users may find it easier to solve problems inside their walls than outside in the community.

The risk is clear: vendors may find it easier to work on a fork where they have business and operational control than work within the community.

Inside the community, we are working to help resolve this challenge with several parallel efforts. As a community member, I challenge you to get involved in these efforts to ensure the project balances dev, biz and ops priorities.  As a board member, I feel it’s a leadership challenge to make sure these efforts converge and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been working on several of these efforts:

  • OpenStack Project Managers (was Hidden Influencers) across companies in the ecosystem are getting organized into their own team. Since these managers effectively direct the majority of OpenStack developers, this group will allow
  • DefCore Committee works to define a smaller subset of the overall OpenStack Project that will be required for vendors using the OpenStack trademark and logo. This helps the business community focus on interoperability and stability.
  • Technical leadership (TC) lead “Big Tent” concept aligns with DefCore work and attempts to create a stable base platform while making it easier for new projects to enter the ecosystem. I’ve got a lot to say about this, but frankly, without safeguards, this scares people in the ops and business communities.
  • An operations “ready state” baseline keeps the community from being able to share best practices – this has become a pressing need.  I’d like to suggest as OpenCrowbar an outside of OpenStack a way to help provide an ops neutral common starting point. Having the OpenStack developer community attempting to create an installer using OpenStack has proven a significant distraction and only further distances operators from the community.

We need to get past seeing the project primarily as a technology platform.  Infrastructure software has to deliver value as an operational tool for enterprises.  For OpenStack to thrive, we must make sure the needs of all constituents (Dev, Biz, Ops) are being addressed.

Ops is Ops, except when it ain’t. Breaking down the impedance mismatches between physical and cloud ops.

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We’ve made great strides in ops automation, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to ops because abstractions have limitations.

IMG_20141108_035537967Perhaps it’s my Industrial Engineering background, I’m a huge fan of operational automation and tooling. I can remember my first experience with VMware ESX and thinking that it needed tooling automation.  Since then, I’ve watched as cloud ops has revolutionized application development and deployment.  We are just at the beginning of the cloud automation curve and our continuous deployment tooling and platform services deliver exponential increases in value.

These cloud breakthroughs are fundamental to Ops and uncovered real best practices for operators.  Unfortunately, much of the cloud specific scripts and tools do not translate well to physical ops.  How can we correct that?

Now that I focus on physical ops, I’m in awe of the capabilities being unleashed by cloud ops. Looking at Netflix chaos monkeys pattern alone, we’ve reached a point where it’s practical to inject artificial failures to improve application robustness.  The idea of breaking things on purpose as an optimization is both terrifying and exhilarating.

In the last few years, I’ve watched (and lead) an application of these cloud tool chains down to physical infrastructure.  Fundamentally, there’s a great fit between DevOps configuration management (Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible) tooling and physical ops.  Most of the configuration and installation work (post-ready state) is fundamentally the same regardless if the services are physical, virtual or containerized.  Installing PostgreSQL is pretty much the same for any platform.

But pretty much the same is not exactly the same.  The differences between platforms often prevent us from translating useful work between frames.  In physics, we’d call that an impedance mismatch: where similar devices cannot work together dues to minor variations.

An example of this Ops impedance mismatch is networking.  Virtual systems present interfaces and networks that are specific to the desired workload while physical systems present all the available physical interfaces plus additional system interfaces like VLANs, bridges and teams.  On a typical server, there at least 10 available interfaces and you don’t get to choose which ones are connected – you have to discover the topology.  To complicate matters, the interface list will vary depending on both the server model and the site requirements.

It’s trivial in virtual by comparison, you get only the NICs you need and they are ordered consistently based on your network requests.  While the basic script is the same, it’s essential that it identify the correct interface.  That’s simple in cloud scripting and highly variable for physical!

Another example is drive configuration.  Hardware presents limitless options of RAID, JBOD plus SSD vs HDD.  These differences have dramatic performance and density implications that are, by design, completely obfuscated in cloud resources.

The solution is to create functional abstractions between the application configuration and the networking configuration.  The abstraction isolates configuration differences between the scripts.  So the application setup can be reused even if the networking is radically different.

With some of our OpenCrowbar latest work, we’re finally able to create practical abstractions for physical ops that’s repeatable site to site.  For example, we have patterns that allow us to functionally separate the network from the application layer.  Using that separation, we can build network interfaces in one layer and allow the next to assume the networking is correct as if it was a virtual machine.  That’s a very important advance because it allows us to finally share and reuse operational scripts.

We’ll never fully eliminate the physical vs cloud impedance issue, but I think we can make the gaps increasingly small if we continue to 1) isolate automation layers with clear APIs and 2) tune operational abstractions so they can be reused.

API Driven Metal = OpenCrowbar + Chef Provisioning

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The OpenCrowbar community created a Chef-Provisioning driver that allows you to quickly build hardware clusters using Chef cookbooks.

2012-08-05_14-13-18_310When we started using Chef in 2011, there was a distinct gap around bootstrapping systems.  The platform did a great job of automation and even connecting services together (via the Search anti-pattern, see below) but lacked a way to build the initial clusters automatically.

The current answer to this problem from Chef is refreshingly simply: a cookbook API extension called Chef Provisioning.  This approach uses the regular Chef DSL in recipes to create request and bind a cluster into Chef.  Basically, the code simply builds an array of nodes using an API that creates the nodes if they are missing from the array in the code.  Specifically, when a node is missing from the array, Chef calls out to create the node in an external system.

For clouds, that means using the API to request a server and then inject credentials for Chef management.  It’s trickier for physical gear because you cannot just make a server in the configuration you need it in.  Physical systems must first be discovered and profiled to ready state: the system must know how many NICs and disk drives are available to correctly configure the hardware prior to laying down the Operating System.

Consequently, Chef Provisioning automation is more about reallocation of existing discovered physical assets to Chef.  That’s exactly the approach the OpenCrowbar team took for our Chef Provisioning driver.

OpenCrowbar interacts with Chef Provisioning by pulling nodes from the System deployment into a Chef Provisioning deployment.  That action then allows the API client to request specific configurations like Operating System or network that need to be setup for Chef to execute.  Once these requests are made, Crowbar will simply run its normal annealing processes to ready state and then injects the Chef credentials.  Chef waits until the work queue is empty and then takes over management of the asset.  When Chef is finished, Crowbar can be instructed to reconfigure the node back to a base state.

Does that sound simple?  It is simple because the Crowbar APIs match the Chef needs very cleanly.

It’s worth noting that this integration is a great test of the OpenCrowbar API design.  Over the last two years, we’ve evolved the API to make it more final result focused.  Late binding is a critical concept for the project and the APIs reflect that objective.  For Chef Provisioning, we allow the integration to focus on simple requests like “give me a node then put this O/S on the node and go.”  Crowbar has the logic needed to figure out how to accomplish those objectives without much additional instruction.

Bonus Side Note: Why Search can become an anti-pattern?  

Search is an incredibly powerful feature in Chef that allows cross-role and cross-node integration; unfortunately, it’s also very difficult to maintain as complexity and contributor counts grow.  The reason is that search creates “forward dependencies” in the scripts that require operators creating data to be aware of downstream, hidden consumers.  High Availability (HA) is a clear example.  If I add a new “cluster database” role to the system then it is very likely to return multiple results for database searches.  That’s excellent until I learn that my scripts have coded search to assume that we only return one result for database lookups.  It’s very hard to find these errors since the searches are decoupled and downstream of the database cookbook.  Ultimately, the community had to advise against embedded search for shared cookbooks

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.

Unicorn captured! Unpacking multi-node OpenStack Juno from ready state.

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OpenCrowbar Packstack install demonstrates that abstracting hardware to ready state smooths install process.  It’s a working balance: Crowbar gets the hardware, O/S & networking right while Packstack takes care of OpenStack.

LAYERSThe Crowbar team produced the first open OpenStack installer back in 2011 and it’s been frustrating to watch the community fragment around building a consistent operational model.  This is not an OpenStack specific problem, but I think it’s exaggerated in a crowded ecosystem.

When I step back from that experience, I see an industry wide pattern of struggle to create scale deployments patterns that can be reused.  Trying to make hardware uniform is unicorn hunting, so we need to create software abstractions.  That’s exactly why IaaS is powerful and the critical realization behind the OpenCrowbar approach to physical ready state.

So what has our team created?  It’s not another OpenStack installer – we just made the existing one easier to use.

We build up a ready state infrastructure that makes it fast and repeatable to use Packstack, one of the leading open OpenStack installers.  OpenCrowbar can do the same for the OpenStack Chef cookbooks or Salt Formula.   It can even use Saltstack, Chef and Puppet together (which we do for the Packstack work)!  Plus we can do it on multiple vendors hardware and with different operating systems.   Plus we build the correct networks!

For now, the integration is available as a private beta (inquiries welcome!) because our team is not in the OpenStack support business – we are in the “get scale systems to ready state and integrate” business.  We are very excited to work with people who want to take this type of functionality to the next level and build truly repeatable, robust and upgradable application deployments.

OpenCrowbar bootstrap positions SSH Keys for hand-offs

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I was reading a ComputerWorld article about how Google and Amazon achieve scale.  The theme: you must do better than linear cost scale and the only way to achieve that is to automate and commoditize hardware.  I find interesting parallels in the Crowbar physical devops effort.

KeysAs the OpenCrowbar team continues to explore the concepts around “ready state,” I discover more and more small ops nuisances that need to be included in the build up before installing software.  These small items quickly add up at scale breaking the rule above.

I’ve already posted about the performance benefit of building a Squid Proxy fabric as part of the underlying ops environment.  As we work on Chef Metal, SaltStack and Packstack integrations (private beta), we’ve rediscovered the importance of management/population of SSH public keys.

In cloud infrastructure, key injection is taken for granted; however, it’s not an automatic behavior in the physical ops.  Since OpenCrowbar handles keys by default but other tools (like Cobbler or Razor) expect that you will use kickstart to inject your SSH keys when you install the Operating System..

Including keys in kickstart (which I’m using generically instead of preseed, auto-yast, jumpstart, etc) hand generated scripts is a potentially dangerous security practice since it makes it difficult to propagate and manage your keys.  It also means that every time a new operating system update is released that you may have to update and retest your kickstarts.  OpenCrowbar has the same challenge but our approach allows everyone can share in the work because our bootstrapping files are scripted and generic.

OpenCrowbar takes care of these ready state configurations in our integrations with these DevOps platforms.  Our experience has been that little items like SSH keys and proxy configurations can make a disproportionate advantage in running scale ops or during iterative development.

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.