Opscode is releasing new Cookbooks for rapid deployment and automation of OpenStack clouds. The new Cookbooks work with OpenStack’s five core projects, including the new identity and dashboard projects announced in September.
The new Cookbooks for Chef were developed in conjunction with Rackspace and Dell, and are immediately available on GitHub.
Matt Ray, senior technical evangelist for Opscode, says that the cookbooks are Crowbar “Barclamps.” That’s a lot of jargon, so here’s the breakdown. Crowbar was originally developed by Dell as an OpenStack installer for Dell, but has evolved into a tool with much more functionality. Crowbar can be used to set up an OpenStack cloud, and also includes a UI and remote APIs to set up the cloud.
It makes use of Chef Cookbooks (also known as “barclamps” here) that do everything from network provisioning to direct hardware control.
Rob Hirschfeld Explains Barclamps
This week, Opscode is releasing Barclamps/Cookbooks for OpenStack Nova, Glance, Swift, Keystone and Dashboard. All of the Cookbooks are being released under the Apache 2 license.
Ray says that the cookbooks will eventually be pulled into the OpenStack Chef Repository on GitHub soon, but there’s a lot of work still being done by Dell, Opscode and Rackspace. He also hopes to have more companies and developers involved with the cookbooks at the OpenStack conference this week in Boston.
Coming soon, Ray says there will be “a number of supporting barclamps/cookbooks being written for testing and high-availability.”
No doubt, we’ll be seeing a lot of OpenStack releases this week during the OpenStack conference. The project is not lacking for momentum.
