This blog post was written by Adam Spiers and Andreas Jaeger.
Here at SUSE we have based our business on Free and Open Source
Software for
over 20 years,
so it is nothing new to say that we strongly believe in open development
and collaboration as a way of producing software of the highest quality.
Therefore we are pleased to announce that we have opened up our work on
development and packaging of OpenStack, Crowbar, and Chef, for both
openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. This work is happening publically
in the Open Build Service, and we warmly invite everyone to use the results
and also join in with development, testing, documentation and packaging.
Open development is a process that does not end with code on public servers,
but involves ongoing open communication as well.
Please speak up on the
opensuse-cloud mailing list
if you see any areas where we could improve further!
OpenStack
OpenStack is our preferred cloud management platform, due to its
open nature and backing from
an already huge and rapidly growing
community. We have packaged both OpenStack's
Folsom release
and the beta packages for the upcoming
Grizzly release and have made them available in the Open Build Service.
Crowbar
OpenStack's incredible flexibility can also make it difficult to deploy. Therefore to ease the set-up of all the different OpenStack components out of the box, we are supporting the open source Crowbar project. Our partners and customers find that using Crowbar dramatically reduces the time spent deploying and managing an OpenStack-based cloud.
Crowbar is a platform for server provisioning and deployment from bare metal. It provides server discovery, firmware upgrades, and operating system installation using PXE Boot, and it deploys applications on top of functioning operating systems using Chef.
Opening up Crowbar development
Similarly to how OpenStack was born at RackSpace and later grew into
an independent entity in the form of the
OpenStack Foundation,
Crowbar was originally developed by Dell engineers, and is now a fully-fledged
Open Source project involving close collaboration with SUSE and others.
There are
weekly public meetings,
a
public mailing list, a
#crowbar IRC channel,
public Trello boards and so on.
As an indication of the project's independent nature, the authoritative location
for the git repositories has changed from https://github.com/dellcloudedge
to
https://github.com/crowbar, and
a new homepage
is currently under construction.
Crowbar 2.0
Work on the upcoming 2.0 release of Crowbar is proceeding at a furious pace,
and packages for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise are
available from the OBS.
You are very welcome to
join in and find out more!
Chef packages
Chef is an Open Source configuration management tool
that allows remote administration of systems at scale. It has
a thriving community
which has a large overlap with the OpenStack community. We have packaged both
Chef 10
and
Chef 11
for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Tying it all together
Since each major release of these projects is packaged separately in the
Open Build Service, you are free to "mix'n'match" which of these components
you want to use together:
- OpenStack Essex
- OpenStack Folsom
- OpenStack Grizzly
- Crowbar 2.0
- Chef 10
- Chef 11
Of course, each combination will work differently. To try any of them out, simply navigate to
one of the project's Repository tab
to obtain the link to the relevant download repository. Then you can add that to your host's list of software repositories
in the normal way via YaST2 or
zypper, and start installing packages from it. Alternatively, you can install directly
via
one-click install.
Automation and Continuous Integration
We use
Jenkins to automatically package changes from upstream git
repositories into rpms within an openSUSE environment, and if they
successfully build and install, Jenkins commits those changes to the
Open Build Service (OBS) which then automatically builds and publishes
packages and images. Jenkins also does unit tests as well as
full stack tests. By automating the packaging and testing process,
we can spend more time on development while maintaining high quality,
and gain more clarity around where problems exist.
You can also read in more detail about our
development model using the Open Build
Service.
Finding out more
If you have questions, ask them on the
opensuse-cloud mailing list or on the recently launched #opensuse-cloud freenode IRC channel.
You can also find more details via the openSUSE wiki:
This is work in progress, so feel free to help improve anything!
