Now that data center are software driven, it is crucial to have a single source of truth, a kind of know all inventory about your resources, your nodes, their functions and their associated parameters, which describe everything and store it in a single location. Welcome reclass which use Class inheritance to define nodes roles and avoid duplication by gathering all important datacenter parameters in a central location. All of this will then be used by your automation tools like Salt, Ansible or Puppet to bootstrap your infrastructure as a software. In other words, reclass can be classified as a hierarchical inventory management solution. Let see how we could use it with Salt.
Always reinventing the wheel doesn’t pay off most of the time, so telling Salt what to do by creating Salt States again and again to install application components isn’t really efficient. Instead Salt Formulas brings convention and a bit of magic, and offer reusable bundles which package altogether all the necessary piece to automate a specific task, like deploying etcd, a distributed key value store cluster, which we will take as an example in this article.
The amazing world of configuration management software is really well populated these days. You may already have looked at Puppet, Chef or Ansible but that’s not all of it, today we focus on SaltStack. Simplicity is at its core without any compromise on speed or scalability. Some users have up to 10.000 minions or more. Salt remote execution is built on top of an event bus which makes Salt unique.
Since my last article about Fuel last June 2013, Mirantis have made great progress. It’s now a good time to review the current status of the recently released Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 Tech Preview which comes with many new features like complete integration with vCenter and NSX. They’ve also released on Dec 18, 2014 a reference architecture for a deployment integrating with VMware vCenter and NSX.
Ansible seems to be the simplest tool to centrally manage systems of any kind, Docker containers, AWS, Google Compute, Rackspace, OpenStack instances, VMware VMs, etc… There isn’t any dependencies on the managed system apart from Python 2.6. Ansible isn’t using any database or daemon and won’t install anything on the managed system, all operations are executed using SSH.
In this article, I’ll details how to install it will introduce the main concepts and terminologies. You’ll then understand why companies like Evernote, Twitter, Nasa, Rackspace or Atlassian are all using this Configuration Management, deployment and orchestration tool Compared to other solutions like Chef, Puppet or SaltStack, Ansible is designed to be minimal in nature with low learning curve.
Last but not least, Ansible seems to be inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin communication device capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication.
Last year I published an article that detailled a deployment of OpenStack Grizzly using Rackspace private cloud solution, let’s update it to the latest 4.2.1 version. You can stick on v4.1.3 if you want to stick on Grizzly instead of OpenStack Havana.
Matt Ray is the community manager of a project at Chef (formerly Opscode) to unify all efforts around building up Chef Cookbooks for OpenStack deployment. For quite some time lots of people were forking the repository from Rackspace, it created a lot of fragmentation, so Matt is now gathering all around the StackForge repository where everyone can contribute. AT&T, Dell, Dreamhost, Gap, HP, HubSpot, IBM, Korea Telecom, Rackspace, SUSE amongst others are already contributing to this project. In this article we will detail how you can use them to deploy OpenStack on your environment.
For quite some time now the Crowbar team have been refactoring their cloud unboxer solution. It is is not yet ready for public consumption, but if you want to see what they’ve got, it’s already possible. Victor Lowther have just released the first CB20 compatible workload which is Ceph, a distributed storage solution from Inktank. This article will build up on the previous one which details the process of building a Crowbar ISO, let see how it differs if you want to see the latest and greatest of Crowbar 2.0. If you really don’t know what we are talking about, just start from the beginning.
Crowbar, a great cloud unboxer, is currently evolving at a rapid pace, if you want to see the latest and greatest thing without waiting any longer, you can build your own Crowbar ISO. In this article we’ll show you how to do just that using the Roxy branch which is supposed to support OpenStack Havanna. We will suppose you aren’t planning to contribute to the code, so we won’t use our any personalized Git repository. If you don’t know what’s Crowbar, it’s platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. But if you want to see how it could be used to deploy OpenStack, read our previous article.
Chef is an outstanding Ruby based configuration management system. It’s main reason for existance is to automate your infrastructure. It will help you bring your application to life, including all the dependencies like web and app servers, load balancers, dns, ntp, just to name a few. You’ll find hundreds of pre-built cookbooks on the Community web site. If you want to learn Chef the best starting point is the LearnChef web site. Today, we will show you how to quickly setup a Chef infrastructure easily step by step.
OpenStack ecosystem grows at a rapid pace, deploying a private cloud starts by choosing the ideal tools for the job. Today we’ll look at what Rackspace have to offer in that space, their Open source Rackspace Private Cloud package enables quick deployment of an OpenStack cloud.
As detailled in the official Crowbar glossary, a barclamp is a set of data, templates and other necessary logic for applying a particular role to a node, or to some set of nodes. Interesting description isn’t it. Let’s dig in the anatomy of a barclamp.
Crowbar is a cloud unboxer that use Chef, meaning it can deploy an OpenStack or Hadoop environment in a breeze. In this article we will use the first release candidate, codename pebbles (build 3476) for OpenStack Grizzly to deploy a demo lab running on VMware Fusion.
If you tried to deploy OpenStack by yourself there a huge probability it failed and you may have given up after multiple unsuccessful tries. Some Linux distribution like Redhat or Suse are packaging everything for you to make things easy but today we’ll look at another alternative from Mirantis a company that just got a new round of financing from Redhat, SAP Ventures and Ericsson. This company offers an easy way to build up an OpenStack cloud environment, Fuel 3.0.
Last time I spoke about YET infrastructure everything was hosted on HP cloud managed by Chef. The thrid chapter will demonstrate how easy moving to another cloud provider could be when you use such a Configuration Management tool.
Nicira and OpsCode partnered to build an OpenStack cloud at VMware. In this webinar we’ll have the opportunity to get some insight about it. It allows their team to build location independant labs in 50 seconds, provisionned from a self service portal. Principal driver: cost, agility and speed.
In our first Boostrap YET article, we’ve seen how we could easily instantiate a new node at HP Cloud using knife hp and some Chef Cookbooks, Roles, … Today we’ll see how we can add Load Balancing into the picture using the HAProxy cookbook.
At the last Chef Conf 2012 event, Nathen Harvey in all honesty revealed when he first approched Chef, he stay away from some advanced concepts. He comes back today to help all of us better understand the arcanes of it. By the way he is currently working for CustomInk, as we can consider them sponsors, don’t hesitate to buy their great T-Shirts.
In this article, we will details all the required steps to build up an environment to host this web site on Nginx using Chef on HP Cloud.
Today’s enterprises are adopting methodologies like DevOps and Continuous Delivery to rapidly deliver applications to customers. Continuously building, testing and releasing applications improves the quality of the applications by providing fast user feedback to development teams; rapid release cycles also ensure tighter collaboration between Dev and Ops teams.
Notes following up a webinar with Matt Ray from Opscode and Carl Perry, Cloud Architect at Dreamhost.
Crowbar is an Open Source solution to quickly provision new services from bare metal servers.