Open Stack

>I like the idea of OOO but it takes time to harden that sort of deployment scenario.  And trying to build a generic tool to hit hardware in the wild is an exercise in futility, to a point.  
>Crowbar actually kind of made sense in so far as it was designed
> to let you write the connector bits you'd need to write.  I figure over time OOO will be forced into that sort of pattern as every automated deployment framework has been for the past 20 years or so.  It's amazing how many times i've seen people try to reinvent
> this wheel, and how many times they've outright ignored the lessons of those who went before.

When I worked for a large telecom doing huge OpenStack deploys this was exactly the problem we were running into. No two orders came with the hardware info in the same format, and when you're deploying hundreds of nodes a month just bootstrapping everything becomes a nightmare. We came up with an idea we called "Open Manifest" (we even considered trying to make it an extension of the Open Compute standards). It is effectively a standard BOM format in JSON. The idea being, with enough buying power, we could get hardware makers on board with providing information in a standard ingestible format which would make this exact problem much easier to deal with. Far less work to be done on the connector bits (clamps I think they were called in crowbar nomenclature), because you would just ingest a standard JSON blob into your bootstrapping process.

I submitted a talk on it a few years back (I think at the Essex summit), but folks didn't seem interested at the time. If it's something people might be interested in now I can probably dig up the notes and work we'd done on it.


-- Kevin