Devops

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. The first time I tried Fuel, I used VMware Fusion to host it. This time, I have a full 3-node vSphere/vSAN cluster up and running which I’ll be using in this article. So it will be a lot closer to a production environment but I won’t be implementating the reference architecture cited above which require bare metal servers for some components and NSX. In this test, everything will be virtualized, which is exactly how VMware Integrated OpenStack VIO is architected. ...

Since my last post about Rackspace Private Cloud (RPC), a Private cloud solution, so much has changed. RPC version number is now aligning with the OpenStack ones, so they’ve switched from v4 directly to v9. It’s also a good idea for Rackspace to bump up the version number to share with the rest of the world this version does have nothing in common with the earlier one, apart from OpenStack code. RPC v9 is now using Ansible instead of Chef and Linux Bridges instead of Open vSwitch until OVS get more stable for their use case. It seems they had issues with it which justify reverting to Linux Bridges instead. They are commiting on 99.99% API availability, so they better have a stable distrib. ...

It’s now time to give Ansible a chance to enter the battleground of OpenStack deployer tool. We’ll use Ansible 1.7 and Blue Box playbooks to achieve that goal. If you don’t have Ansible already installed, consult our previous article or the official documentation. You’ll see it’s quite easy. Ansible by itself doesn’t install the Operating system on Bare Metal. But Ansible author, Michael DeHaan, developped Cobbler a PXE solution back when working for Red Hat. So you can use this tool or any other tools like MAAS, Razor to install at least four Ubuntu 12.04 servers. ...

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 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. First of all let’s details what’s new since version 4.0. The newer 4.2.x branch now support: OpenStack Havana code base. Load Balancing as a Service in OpenStack Networking (Neutron) using the HAProxy service provider. full OpenStack Metering implementation (Ceilometer) OpenStack Orchestration (Heat) is now available as a tech preview with standard Heat and CloudWatch API. It can be enabled afterward by applying the Heat role to the controller node after deployment. Quantum has been renamed to Neutron L3 Agent now available, it enables floating IPs and routers. LVM is now the default provider for Cinder But the biggest evolution is the fact that RackSpace Private Cloud is now declared Production Ready, yeah !!! ...