Earlier this month at DevOpsDays here in Austin the Dell Crowbar crew hosted a session and gave a demo. If you’re not familiar with it, Crowbar is an open source software framework written at Dell. I grabbed some time with Crowbar architect Rob Hirschfeld and got him to recap how far we’ve come in its less than a year and where he sees us going over the next year.
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Posted by Barton George
As I mentioned in my last entry, Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame stopped by Dell this morning on his way back from CES. Between meetings Mark and I did a couple of quick videos. Here is the second of the two. Whereas the first focused on the client, this one focuses on the Cloud and the back-end.
Some of the ground Mark covers
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Posted by Barton George
This afternoon Matt Ray, Technical Evangelist for Opscode, stopped by Dell’s Round Rock HQ to brief a gaggle of folks on what they are up to. Cote arranged the visit as well as one last month with Puppet labs, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to make.
After Matt, with some help from teammates on the phone, briefed the Dell gang I grabbed some time with him to get the 5 minute Reader’s Digest version. Here is the result.
Some of the ground Matt covers:
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Posted by Barton George
Besides interviewing a bunch of people at Hadoop World, I also got a chance to sit on the other side of the camera. On the first day of the conference I got a slot on SiliconANGLE’s the Cube and was interviewed by Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon and John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.
-> Check out the video here.
Some of the ground we cover
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Posted by Barton George
I’m always interested in what’s happening at Canonical and with Ubuntu. Last week at Hadoop World I ran into a couple of folks from the company (coincidentally both named Mark but neither Mr. Shuttleworth). Mark Mims from the server team was willing to chat so I grabbed some time with him to learn about what he was doing at Hadoop World and what in the heck is this “charming” Juju?
Some of the ground Mark covers
But wait, there’s more!
Stay tuned for more interviews from last week’s Hadoop world. On tap are:
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Posted by Barton George
Rob Hirschfeld, aka “Commander Crowbar,” recently posted a blog entry looking back at how 
Crowbar came to be, how its grown and where he hopes it will go from here.
What’s a Crowbar?
If you’re not familiar with Crowbar, its an open source software framework that began life as an installation tool to speed installation of OpenStack on Dell hardware. The project incorporates the Opscode Chef Server tool and was originally created here at Dell by Rob and Greg Althaus. Just four short months ago at OSCON 2011 the project took a big step forward when, along with the announcement of our OpenStack solution, we announced that we were opensourcing it.
DevOps-ilicous
As Rob points out in his blog, as we were delivering Crowbar as an installer a collective light bulb went off and we realized the role that Chef and tools like it play in a larger movement taking place in many Web shops today: the movement of DevOps.
The DevOps approach to deployment builds up systems in a layered model rather than using packaged images…Crowbar’s use of a DevOps layered deployment model provides flexibility for BOTH modularized and integrated cloud deployments.
On beyond installation and OpenStack
As the team began working more with Crowbar, it occurred to them that its use could be expanded in two ways: it could be used to do more than installation and it could be expanded to work with projects beyond OpenStack.
As for functionality, Crowbar now not only installs and configures but once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.
The first project beyond OpenStack that we used Crowbar on was Hadoop. In order to expand Crowbar’s usage we created the concept of “barclamps” which are in essence modules that sit on top of the basic Crowbar functionality. After we created the Hadoop barclamp, others picked up the charge and VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph barclamp.
It takes a community
Crowbar development has recently been moved out into the open. As Rob explains,
This change was reflected in our work on OpenStack Diablo (+ Keystone and Dashboard) with contributions by Opscode and Rackspace Cloud Builders. Rather than work internally and push updates at milestones, we are now coding directly from the Crowbar repositories on Github.
So what are you waiting for? Join our mailing list, download the code or ISO, create a barclamp, make your voice heard. Who’s next?
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Posted by Barton George
In case you’re not familiar with Cloud Foundry, it’s an open source Platform as a Service 
project initiated at VMware. More specifically it provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.
The project began two years ago when VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz recruited Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky out of Google and set them to working on Cloud Foundry. Collison and Lucovsky, who built and maintained Google’s API services, were brought into leverage their experience of working with hugely scaled out architectures.
The Cloud Foundry project has only been public for a matter of months and one question that I’m sure has popped into your mind is what if I want to pilot Cloud Foundry in my own environment, won’t installation and configuration be a total pain?
Enter the Crowbar
Crowbar is an open source software framework developed at Dell to speed up the installation 
and configuration of open source cloud software onto bare metal systems. By automating the process, Crowbar can reduce the time needed for installation from days to hours.
The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, “barclamps” sit on top of it to allow it work with a variety of projects. The first use for crowbar was for OpenStack and the barclamp for that has been donated to the community. Next came The Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop and, just recently, Dreamhost announced that they currently working on a Ceph barclamp. And now…
Two great tastes that taste great together
Today’s big news is that VMware is working with Dell to release and maintain a Crowbar barclamp that, in conjunction with Crowbar, will install and configure Cloud Foundry. This capability, which will include multi-node configs over time, will allow organizations and service providers the ability to quickly and easily get pilots of Cloud Foundry up and running.
Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.
If you’d like to try out Crowbar for yourself, check out: https://github.com/DellCloudEdge
Press added after initial posting
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Posted by Barton George
Last week on Day two of Structure the morning sessions ended with an interesting discussion moderated by James Urquhart. The session was entitled “DevOps – Reinventing the Developers Role in the Cloud Age” and featured Luke Kanies – CEO, Puppet Labs and Jesse Robbins – Co-Founder and CEO, Opscode.
After lunch I ran into Jesse and got him to sit down with me and provide some more insight into DevOps as well as explain what Opscode was doing with project Crowbar.
Some of the ground Jesse covers
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Posted by Barton George
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