Automation

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. ...

Last time I spoke about YET infrastructure everything was hosted on HP cloud managed by Chef. This thrid chapter will demonstrate how easy moving to another cloud provider could be when you use such a Configuration Management tool. Installing Knife Rackspace Rackspace Cloud Servers use a different variant of OpenStack when we compare it to HP Cloud. So there is a specific plugin to deal with their cloud. To install it you just need to type: ...

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. Operational Efficiency and business velocity were going down due to the inherent complexity of their infrastructure but after the implementation of cloud automation tricks, it all inversed. ...

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. Add HA Proxy cookbook to your chef-repo To install the community version of haproxy cookbook (it’s not the latest one): % knife cookbook site install haproxy NOTE: You could use Librarian-chef or Berkshelf to manage your cookbooks dependencies in a cleaner way. ...

In this article, we will details all the required steps to build up an environment to host the previous incarnation of this blog on Nginx using Chef on HP Cloud. Twelve years later the world has changed and this blog is now hosted on a bare metal machine in Germany. Chef Repo cloning First of all, if you don’t already have a Chef Repository available on your Chef Workstation, you can clone one easily : ...

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. In this webinar we will learn how the integrated Opscode Chef and Electric Cloud solution automates the end-to-end application delivery process to: ...

Notes following up a webinar with Matt Ray from Opscode and Carl Perry, Cloud Architect at Dreamhost. Presenters Matt Ray - Senior Technical Evangelist @ Opscode Carl Perry - Cloud Architect @ DreamHost 42 slides should be available on the mailing list Chef for OpenStack soon OpenStack Mission Statement Apache 2 license provides all the feature to run Private or Public Cloud regardless of size massively scalable compatibility with Amazon or other clouds HP CLoud, RackSpace are using it but let’s talk about DreamHost today Why OpenStack Control: Open source, no vendor lock in. (Apache 2 license) Flexibility: Modular design integrates legacy and 3rd party technology Emerging Industry Standard: more then 180 technology leaders back it and major cloud built on it Proven Compatible and Connected: Enables portability OpenStack Components Nova VMs runs on top of KVM Xen LHC Hyper-V and more Cinder (used to be called nova-volume) Block storage for the VM similar to EBS from Amazon drivers for Nexenta, NetApp, … Quantum new project released with Folsom SDN technology sits on the network layer handles management and configuration of the VM networking DreamHost use Nicira Glance Image Registry Source of the VMs that runs under Nova Keystone Common authentication layer check for crendentials and provides token that are passed around could be token-based, AWS, LDAP or other forms Swift Original Rackspace Cloud Files object store that came from RackSpace DreamHost use Ceph instead Horizon self-service role-based web interface for users and administrators provision cloud based resources Ceph Saige Weil PhD project now spined off to Inktank Next generation distributed storage runs on commodity hardware Raw Block, RESTful object storage service, Filesystem (in pre-release) Ceph Components Ceph Monitor: Maintain map of current cluster health Ceph OSD: Manages a single physical storage volume (1 OSD per hard drive but 1 OSD per RAID volume could be done too) Everything is broken in 4 MB objects Ceph RESTful RADOS Gateway: Provides SWIFT or S3 compatible RESTful Object Storage API Ceph Metadata Server: Provides distributed POSIX layer for filesystem (only needed for POSIX Filesystem service) Components all run in user space (no kernel modifications required) DreamObjects - DreamHost Ceph offering Nics will be upgraded to 10G to avoid Nic bonding to gain management simplicity 3 replicas per object at DreamObjects it is all the time consistent !!! Each write is acknowledged. ...