I’m overwhelmed and humbled by the enthusiasm my team at Dell is seeing for the OpenStack Essex Deploy day on 5/31 (or 6/1 for Asia). What started as a day for our engineers to hack on Essex Cookbooks with a few fellow Crowbarians has morphed into an international OpenStack event spanning Europe, Americas & Asia.

If you want to read more about the event, check out my event logistics post (link pending).

I do not apologize for my promotion of the Dell-lead open source Crowbar as the deployment tool for the OpenStack Essex Deploy. For a community to focus on improving deployment tooling, there must be a stable reference infrastructure. Crowbar provides a fast and repeatable multi-node environment with scriptable networking and packaging.

I believe that OpenStack benefits from a repeatable multi-node reference deployment. I’ll go further and state that this requires DevOps tooling to ensure consistency both within and between deployments.

DevStack makes trunk development more canonical between different developers. I hope that Crowbar will help provide a similar experience for operators so that we can truly share deployment experience and troubleshooting. I think it’s already realistic for Crowbar deployments to a repeatable enough deployment that they provide a reference for defect documentation and reproduction.

Said more plainly, it’s a good thing if a lot of us use OpenStack in the same way so that we can help each out.

My team’s choice to accelerate releasing the Crowbar barclamps for OpenStack Essex makes perfect sense if you accept our rationale for creating a community baseline deployment.

Crowbar is Dell-lead, not Dell specific.

One of the reasons that Crowbar is open source and we do our work in the open (yes, you can see our daily development in github) is make it safe for everyone to invest in a shared deployment strategy. We encourage and welcome community participation.

PS: I believe the same is true for any large scale software project. Watch out for similar activity around Apache Hadoop as part of our collaboration with Cloudera!