Dell's Rob Hirschfeld and Opscode's Matt Ray's talk at OSCON 2012 on the state of automating and deploying OpenStack.

1. Automation and DevOps Best Practices
Rob Hirschfeld, Dell
Matt Ray, Opscode

2. Deploying & Managing a Cloud is not simple.
• Deploying to physical gear on layered networks
• Multiple interlocking projects
• Hundreds of configuration options
• An aggressive 6 month delivery cycle
• Constant innovation on core technologies
It does not have to be hard!

3. Problem: Clouds do not operate themselves!
Operations
Servers
Networks
Storage
Etc.
Expertise

4. Ops automation (“devops”) jumpstarts learning,
reduces complexity and manages scale.
Operations
Automation
ic
(DevOps)
ur Top
O
Servers
Networks
Storage
Etc.
Operations
Expertise

5. DevOps is CAMS
‣ Culture
‣ Automation
‣ Measurement
‣ Sharing

6. Foundation for Success: Open Operations
‣ Start with “Operations as Code”
‣ Leverage the community
‣ Write Operations code so it can be openly shared
‣ Learn from other people’s experience
‣ Make operations a priority
‣ Engage developers in operations challenges
‣ Make deployability a dev & test concern
‣ These are central issues to Opscode & Dell

7. What is Chef?
‣ An Open Source automation platform to continuously
define, build, and manage infrastructure.
‣ Chef enables people to easily build & manage complex &
dynamic applications at massive scale
‣ Built on the idea of Infrastructure as Code
‣ Programmatically provision and configure nodes
‣ Reconstruct business from code repository, data backup, and
bare metal resources.

8. How Can Chef Help?
Blueprint Your Build Anything… And Manage It Simply
Infrastructure
Provision compute • Introduce continuous
• Compute resources in the Data incremental change or total
change.
• Application Center and the Cloud
• Infrastructure • Automatically reconfigure
• Storage everything
• Security • Application Stacks • Re-provision for disaster
• Network • Big Data recovery
• Configuration Standards • HPC • Fail-over to bare metal
• IaaS • Monitor for compliance
• PaaS • Cloud migrations become
Using 1,000’s of man- trivial
• SaaS
days of prior art!

9. A model for reuse that works!
500+ Cookbooks
© Opscode, 2011 – Confidential – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE 9

10. The Path to Full Automation
Full
Continuous Infrastructure
Deployment
Automation
Application
Configuration Management
Common
Discovery and Management
Automation
Visibility
Tasks:
Scripts, OS
Compliance,
Updates &
Patches

11. OpenStack has a lot of interlocking parts!

12. …and it matters how they are deployed!
Cookbooks

13. Clouds are a complex: not like an app
‣ Building up OpenStack requires a system view
‣ Breaking projects into discrete cookbooks enables maintainability
‣ Conventions are needed so that projects and cross reference each other
‣ Networking is critical
‣ Each component requires correct VLAN, teaming and virtual bridge configuration.
‣ Each site has unique networking needs (IP, subnet, VLAN)
‣ NIC enumeration can break even the simplest scipts
‣ Hardware configuration is boring but very important
‣ Application choices force configuration changes (late binding)
‣ Small mistakes can be very expensive to find and fix
‣ We needed a way to make deploy simpler, faster & repeatable

14. OpenStack Installer: Dell Crowbar Project
‣ Field Proven Technologies
‣ Build on locally deployed Chef Server, Raw servers to full cloud in <2
hours, Multi-Node from the ground up, Hardened with over a year of
real deployments
‣ Apache 2 Open Source (on github/dellcloudedge)
‣ Multi-Apps (OpenStack & Hadoop), Multi-OS (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS,
SUSE), Development “in the open” w/ community engagement
‣ OpenStack Releases (dell.com/OpenStack)
‣ Cactus, Diablo and Essex!
‣ Not Dell Hardware Limited

15. Crowbar Builds Up Clouds in layers
APIs, User Access, &
Ecosystem Partners
Ops Management
Dell “Crowbar”
Cloud Infrastructure
Core Components &
Operating Systems
Physical Resources

16. 1) Hardware Configuration
APIs, User Access, &
Ecosystem Partners
Ops Management
Dell “Crowbar”
Cloud Infrastructure
Core Components &
Operating Systems
Physical Resources

17. 2) OS and Ops Infrastructure
APIs, User Access, &
Ecosystem Partners
Ops Management
Dell “Crowbar”
Cloud Infrastructure
Core Components &
Operating Systems *
Physical Resources
* Suse pending, based on open source activity

18. 3) Cloud Platform Integration
APIs, User Access, &
Ecosystem Partners
Ops Management
Dell “Crowbar”
Cloud Infrastructure
Core Components &
Operating Systems *
Physical Resources
* Suse pending, based on open source activity

19. 4) Cloud App Management
APIs, User Access, &
Ecosystem Partners
Ops Management
Dell “Crowbar”
Cloud Infrastructure
Core Components &
Operating Systems
Physical Resources

20. OpenStack Orchestration: Chef & Crowbar
Status (po
st)
Orchestration
State Machine
OpenStack Components
Ops Management
Crowbar Magic Happens!
nt
Clie
Dell “Crowbar”
f-
Che
Run List
Chef-Client
Network Configuration
Chef
Server Chef-C
lient
Operating System
Config.
Che
f-C
lien
t
Hardware Config
(uses “Sledgehammer”)
DHCP
Server(s)
t
PXE Boo

21. Crowbar & OpenStack Cookbooks
‣ Having cookbooks is not enough, Crowbar also
‣ Understands how the cookbooks connect together
‣ Helps you plan out the networking & server allocations
‣ Crowbar has a consistent Chef design approach
‣ “Proposal” databags to setup attributes and run-lists
‣ Consistent naming conventions
‣ Roles to link things together – A LOT OF ROLES
‣ Crowbar adds many cookbooks for network,
monitoring, provisioning & hardware config.

22. Chef for OpenStack
‣ Community for the automated deployment and
management of OpenStack
‣ opscode.com/openstack/
‣ Cookbooks
‣ Documentation
‣ Mailing list
‣ groups.google.com/group/opscode-chef-openstack
‣ IRC
‣ #openstack-chef on irc.freenode.net

23. Chef for OpenStack Goals
Already a lot of OpenStack deployments managed with Chef
‣ Provide a stable set of core OpenStack cookbooks
‣ Document how the pieces work together
‣ Evolve to keep up with latest changes
‣ Expand support into new technologies
‣ Operating systems, databases, hypervisors, etc.
‣ Alternate storage types
‣ Alternate networking implementations for Quantum

24. Chef for OpenStack Roadmap
‣ Get stable Essex cookbooks out
‣ Establish patterns of collaboration
‣ Continuous Integration and gated testing
‣ Folsom milestones
‣ Documentation, documentation, documentation

25. Upstreaming accelerates strong deploys
‣ Feedback loops enable cookbooks to mature quickly
Community Cookbooks
Dell Crowbar
Chef
Cloud A
Host B
Crowbar Dell Cloud A
Chef Community
Community
Customers
Customers

26. Infrastructure as Code Repositories
‣ Deploy your data center with Crowbar
‣ Store this in version control
‣ Test your changes
‣ Promote to production
‣ Rinse, repeat
‣ OpenStack deployment is managed with Chef
‣ See above
‣ Deploy your applications on OpenStack with Chef
‣ See above

27. Deploy Your Applications on OpenStack
‣ Nova Dashboard
‣ Knife OpenStack
‣ enStratus
‣ Hybrid Cloud!?

28. knife-openstack

29. knife-openstack
$ knife openstack
Available openstack subcommands: (for details, knife SUB-
COMMAND --help)
** OPENSTACK COMMANDS **
knife openstack flavor list (options)
knife openstack image list (options)
knife openstack server create (options)
knife openstack server delete SERVER [SERVER] (options)
knife openstack server list (options)

30. knife-openstack
knife openstack server create --flavor 1 --image 7
-S keypair -r 'role[hadoop-worker]’
‣ Deploy applications on top of OpenStack
‣ Manage them with Chef
‣ Configuration backed by version control
‣ Transfer your infrastructure anywhere

31. Challenges
‣ Making Community work sharable
‣ Testing / Validation
‣ Community
‣ Keeping on Upstreams
‣ Automation (Tempest & CI)
‣ Linking Dev and Ops
‣ Upgrade Process
‣ # of configurations

32. Join the Community & Get Started
‣ Invest in reusing community code
‣ Respect abstractions & patterns from community code
‣ Participate in communities
‣ Submit bugs (and patches!)
‣ Use Upstreams!
‣ Community Cookbooks… Opscode
‣ community.opscode.com
‣ Deploy Infrastructure… Dell Crowbar
‣ github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar

33. Thanks!
Rob Hirschfeld
‣ rob_hirschfeld@dell.com
‣ Twitter: @zehicle
‣ Blog: robhirschfeld.com
Matt Ray
‣ matt@opscode.com
‣ Twitter/GitHub/IRC: @mattray
‣ Blog: leastresistance.net