Open Stack

On Aug 12, 2013, at 12:34 PM, Jake G. <dj_dark_junglist at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have been messing around with a few different tools for deploying openstack, but most of them seem they are designed for test environments.
> 
> Just wonder what everyone's opinion is on the best tool for deploying a production quality environment? Or is it best to install each component 
> one by one without using a deployment tool?

What do you mean by "deployment" in this context?  Chef recipes or Puppet modules?  Something else?


I can tell you -- with confidence -- that both Chef recipes and Puppet modules are perfectly fine for deploying openstack in a production environment, and which one of them will fit your needs will depend more on your specific situation than anything else.

For example, Dell deploys thousands upon thousands of nodes on a regular basis in their cloud services using tools like Chef, and builds their cloud services facilities from the ground-up using tools like Crowbar and "bar clamps", which are based on Chef plus some custom code.  At a recent Austin OpenStack Meetup, we learned about Puppet+Razor to solve similar problems.

Although my personal preference is for Chef, I know that internally to our own company, we use both Puppet and Chef, for production deployments for pretty much all of our various customers.  I know that sites like Etsy and Nordstroms use Chef to do their cloud deployments for thousands upon thousands of nodes on a daily (or even hourly) basis, and I assume that there are equally large customers out there on the Puppet side.


So, what is it that you're trying to do and what kinds of tools have you tried to use?

--
Brad Knowles <bknowles at momentumsi.com>
Senior Consultant