Tag Archives: Refactor

The real workloads begin: Crowbar’s Sophomore Year

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Given Crowbar‘s frenetic Freshman year, it’s impossible to predict everything that Crowbar could become. I certainly aspire to see the project gain a stronger developer community and the seeds of this transformation are sprouting. I also see that community driven work is positioning Crowbar to break beyond being platforms for OpenStack and Apache Hadoop solutions that pay the bills for my team at Dell to invest in Crowbar development.

I don’t have to look beyond the summer to see important development for Crowbar because of the substantial goals of the Crowbar 2.0 refactor.

Crowbar 2.0 is really just around the corner so I’d like to set some longer range goals for our next year.

  • Growing acceptance of Crowbar as an in data center extension for DevOps tools (what I call CloudOps)
  • Deeper integration into more operating environments beyond the core Linux flavors (like virtualization hosts, closed and special purpose operating systems.
  • Improvements in dynamic networking configuration
  • Enabling more online network connected operating modes
  • Taking on production ops challenges of scale, high availability and migration
  • Formalization of our community engagement with summits, user groups, and broader developer contributions.

For example, Crowbar 2.0 will be able to handle downloading packages and applications from the internet. Online content is not a major benefit without being able to stage and control how those new packages are deployed; consequently, our goals remains tightly focused improvements in orchestration.

These changes create a foundation that enables a more dynamic operating environment. Ultimately, I see Crowbar driving towards a vision of fully integrated continuous operations; however, Greg & Rob’s Crowbar vision is the topic for tomorrow’s post.

Crowbar 2.0 Objectives: Scalable, Heterogeneous, Flexible and Connected

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The seeds for Crowbar 2.0 have been in the 1.x code base for a while and were recently accelerated by SuSE.  With the Dell | Cloudera 4 Hadoop and Essex OpenStack-powered releases behind us, we will now be totally focused bringing these seeds to fruition in the next two months.

Getting the core Crowbar 2.0 changes working is not a major refactoring effort in calendar time; however, it will impact current Crowbar developers by changing improving the programming APIs. The Dell Crowbar team decided to treat this as a focused refactoring effort because several important changes are tightly coupled. We cannot solve them independently without causing a larger disruption.

All of the Crowbar 2.0 changes address issues and concerns raised in the community and are needed to support expanding of our OpenStack and Hadoop application deployments.

Our technical objective for Crowbar 2.0 is to simplify and streamline development efforts as the development and user community grows. We are seeking to:

  1. simplify our use of Chef and eliminate Crowbar requirements in our Opscode Chef recipes.
    1. reduce the initial effort required to leverage Crowbar
    2. opens Crowbar to a broader audience (see Upstreaming)
  2. provide heterogeneous / multiple operating system deployments. This enables:
    1. multiple versions of the same OS running for upgrades
    2. different operating systems operating simultaneously (and deal with heterogeneous packaging issues)
    3. accommodation of no-agent systems like locked systems (e.g.: virtualization hosts) and switches (aka external entities)
    4. UEFI booting in Sledgehammer
  3. strengthen networking abstractions
    1. allow networking configurations to be created dynamically (so that users are not locked into choices made before Crowbar deployment)
    2. better manage connected operations
    3. enable pull-from-source deployments that are ahead of (or forked from) available packages.
  4. improvements in Crowbar’s core database and state machine to enable
    1. larger scale concerns
    2. controlled production migrations and upgrades
  5. other important items
    1. make documentation more coupled to current features and easier to maintain
    2. upgrade to Rails 3 to simplify code base, security and performance
    3. deepen automated test coverage and capabilities

Beyond these great technical targets, we want Crowbar 2.0 is to address barriers to adoption that have been raised by our community, customers and partners. We have been tracking concerns about the learning curve for adding barclamps, complexity of networking configuration and packaging into a single ISO.

We will kick off to community part of this effort with an online review on 7/16 (details).

PS: why a refactoring?

My team at Dell does not take on any refactoring changes lightly because they are disruptive to our community; however, a convergence of requirements has made it necessary to update several core components simultaneously. Specifically, we found that desired changes in networking, operating systems, packaging, configuration management, scale and hardware support all required interlocked changes. We have been bringing many of these changes into the code base in preparation and have reached a point where the next steps require changing Crowbar 1.0 semantics.

We are first and foremost an incremental architecture & lean development team – Crowbar 2.0 will have the smallest footprint needed to begin the transformations that are currently blocking us. There is significant room during and after the refactor for the community to shape Crowbar.