#crowbar

Hi all, I'm working on some PoC and was looking for some current documentation for Crowbar

the only docs Ive found are dated back to 2012-2013

maybe someone knows if there is anything up-to-date?

qwe_: hi, Crowbar is maintained by SUSE these days

our product documentation is very comprehensive

thanks for the link - I've seen that before

(and indeed this is very comprehensive)

however, what I'm looking for is ore like development guide - I'm trying to find a way to install a sample component using crowbar

I guess I should start with writing my own barclamp

qwe_: what barclamp are you interested in writing?

qwe_: maybe we can help

well, we are considering to integrate our cloud monitoring solution into suse cloud installer

rigt now we use ansible playbooks, and potentially we have two options:

1) (easier one) somehow trigger ansible scripts by crowbar

2) (harder one?) rewrite all our installation into chef/crowbar

so I'm looking for some manuals to carry on with the PoC

cool!

sounds like something we'd want to help with

I guess it would be possible to trigger ansible from chef

if your playbooks are complex

but if they're not, it would be cleaner to rewrite as Chef cookbooks

vuntz: I'm guessing we don't have uptodate docs on writing new barclamps?

vuntz: how do we normally assist people who want to write one?

qwe_: can I ask what the monitoring solution is?

I guess so ;) it's monasca -> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Monasca

I'd say our playbooks are rather complex, so it would be way easier and faster for us to somehow use them from crowbar

BTW: crowbar looks quite impressive

qwe_: thanks :) it's pretty powerful, and we're improving it all the time

qwe_: I'd *love* to see a monasca barclamp! that's very much aligned with our product, so I'm sure we can assist you with this

that's great news!

I met some of the monasca folks in Austin, and liked what I heard

we talked about the potential role of monasca in user stories like http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/openstack-...

aspiers, qwe_: the usual way is to look at how the last barclamp was created :-)

vuntz: that's more or less what I thought you might say :)

vuntz: so we don't have that template barclamp mechanism any more I guess

for instance https://github.com/crowbar/crowbar-openstack/pu... and https://github.com/crowbar/crowbar-openstack/pu...

(although they have some small issue, last time I looked)

oh, I see

vuntz: do we have any training material on barclamps? I can't remember

so I'll need to do some reverse-engineering ;)

qwe_: if you submit the barclamp, then you would even get reviews to help you go in the right direction :-)

aspiers: I don't remember any

qwe_: I think that murano PR is pretty easy to understand but I'm more than happy to answer your questions

thanks, I'll take a look into this

qwe_: I guess you could start simply by checking out that branch, doing a s/murano/monasca/g, replacing the config files and configurable attributes

qwe_: if you haven't already deployed SOC6 we can help you with that

probably the appliance is the fastest way for this case

well, I used your mkcloud script to deploy CLoud 7 Beta 3

oh hahah ok, even better :)

well, it took me 3 or 4 days to make it run, but I was determined to make it work ;)

excellent :)

vuntz: too bad our Crowbar packages aren't in OBS :-/

anyway, before I try working on my barclamp, do you think it is even possible t integrate ansible into crowbar?

qwe_: anything's possible ;-)

in one of the architecture pictures, I can see that there is Chef/Puppet/...

Chef can inject arbitrary files and run arbitrary commands

but has anyone ever tried it?

which picture is that? there is no puppet

let me find it

the old OpenCrowbar architecture supported multiple config management backends, but we never switched to that since it was almost a complete rewrite

yeah, we should ditch that diagram

well, yes - Puppet is greyed-out :)

there is no jig in crowbar

Crowbar 2.0 was renamed to OpenCrowbar (don't ask ...) and then to Digital Rebar or something

so all this documentation is pretty much outdated, isn't it?

I'm afraid so :-(

we need to board up those broken windows

hmm... and could I ask what is your opinion? which solution is better? Should I try to reuse my ansible playbooks or it would be better to rewrite it to integrate nicly with chef/crowbar?

are the playbooks online somewhere I can look at?

I don't expect it would be much work to convert to Chef

and certainly that would produce the cleanest code

about our playbooks - I'm afraid I'd need to ask someone about that, as they are not publicly available

no problem

qwe_: if you already have SOC7 deployed, I'd suggest following the approach I outlined, and then ping us here when you get stuck

qwe_: hopefully you'll find it pretty obvious in that PR how the pieces fit together

there's a clear separation between the Chef cookbook and the Crowbar Rails app components

OK, I'll try to do so

thanks!

maybe one small question to start with: I can see that for example Ceilometer barclamp has a number of roles (?), like ceilometer-agent, ceilometer-server, ...

and for monasca we have several components

so I guess I should create a single barclamp with also a number of roles

is that correct?

yes

ok, thanks

although sometimes, we just always run some services always together

so we don't necessarily need one role per service

see the nova barclamp, for instance, where we have the nova-controller role that covers nova-api, nova-scheduler, etc.

it's more a matter of what makes sense :-)

yep, that makes sense :-)

how could reach you in case of more questions? is this webchat ok, or maybe you use some other means?

here is fine, but you need to explicitly ping some of us I guess :-)

but there's also a mailing list

great thanks!

and of course, you can submit a pull request and have some discussion there

sure, I will remember that