Opscode, Dell, and Rackspace Are Making Crowbar Even More Awesome

Since the very beginning of this year, Opscode has been working with two other OpenStack pioneers, Rackspace and Dell, to make the process of building and deploying OpenStack as easy and consistent as possible.

From those efforts emerged Crowbar, an open source “datacenter installer” released by Dell just a few months ago. Crowbar extends Chef in some truly exciting ways and allows a new OpenStack user to get up and running in an astonishingly short amount of time. For more details, take a spin through the blogs of Rob Hirschfeld and Joseph George, view Dell’s OpenStack Cloud Solution content and join the Crowbar mailing list.

This week marks an important next step in that process, with a number of exciting collaborations by Opscode, Dell and Rackspace. Our teams are working together to…

• Add support for Diablo (the next major release of OpenStack) and putting together a support roadmap for future releases. This includes an updated set of Chef OpenStack cookbooks built using the expertise of Opscode, Rackspace Cloud Builders and Dell and all released as open source.
• Make Barclamps modularized so other applications may be deployed with Crowbar (Hadoop, Cloud Foundry and more to come). Barclamp deployment modules used by Crowbar and are somewhat analogous to Chef recipes. Read more here.
• Make a highly-available and scalable deployment of OpenStack even easier to achieve.

While Opscode, Dell and Rackspace are the initial anchor tenants for this work, we’re excited to see others joining us. If you want to help, swing on over to the Crowbar project and drop us a line!