By Rob Hirschfeld
I’ve been relatively quiet about the OpenCrowbar Drill release and that’s not a fair reflection of the level of capability and maturity reflected in the code base; however, it really just sets the stage for truly ground breaking ops automation work in the next release (“Epoxy”).
So, what’s in Drill? Scale and Containers on Metal Workloads! https://github.com/opencrowbar/core/releases
The primary focus for this release was proving our functional operations architectural pattern against a wide range of workloads and that is exactly what the RackN team has been doing with Ceph, Docker, Kubernetes, CloudFoundry and StackEngine workloads.
In addition to workloads, we put the platform through its paces in real ops environments at scale. That resulted in even richer network configurations and options plus performance and tuning. The RackN team continues to adapt OpenCrowbar to match real work ops.
One critical lesson you’ll see more in the Epoxy release: OpenCrowbar and the team at RackN will keep finding ways to adapt to the ops environment. We believe that tools should adapt to their environments: we’ve encountered some pretty extreme quirks and our philosophy is embrace don’t force change.