Gettings Started with the Chef for OpenStack docs

I have primarily been focused on documentation lately and the http://github.com/mattray/openstack-chef-docs is the repository. Since there is so much interaction between the various components, prerequisites and cookbooks, I felt a unified document format would best serve our needs. The various markdown readmes and documentation is slowly migrating to this single repository so it can be kept updated in a single location and link to the various components.

The docs are in Restructured Text and use Sphinx, which is compatible with the http://docs.openstack.org source docs. The license matches the OpenStack documentation’s Apache V2 and Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Opscode has standardized on this format for our own documentation and in the near future it will be merged upstream with official Opscode documentation.

The evolving document is currently broken into these 6 components:
* Architecture – overview of the architecture for Chef for OpenStack.
* Prerequisites – the hardware, network and operating system requirements.
* Installation – how to install Chef for Openstack.
* Example Deployment – example configuration of a small test lab.
* Knife-OpenStack – using the OpenStack plugin for Knife for provisioning and managing instances.
* Additional Resources – additional useful information and links related to Chef for OpenStack.

The docs are just getting started, lots of placeholders but I’m active writing. Please feel free to send corrections and additional details to help fill things out. There will be a permanent URL for the docs online soon, here is a temporary link:
http://15.185.230.54/

Chef for OpenStack Status 10/22

I’ve decided to start cross-posting my status emails for the Chef for OpenStack project to help spread the word. The Chef for OpenStack mailing list is here, please join: http://groups.google.com/group/opscode-chef-openstack

I apologize for the lack of updates, but I come bearing lots of news. For a quick summary of the state of Chef for OpenStack, check out this deck from my presentation at the OpenStack Summit:

Chef for OpenStack – OpenStack Fall 2012 Summit from Matt Ray

Speaking of the OpenStack Summit, it was quite productive despite not getting to attend enough sessions due to meetings and booth duty. Monday there was a session on “Upstreaming Chef Cookbooks”, which was essentially a meetup of folks working on Chef for OpenStack. We compared notes and there is quite a lot of work being done in the various branches maintained outside the Opscode one, I’m looking forward to merging as much of the work as possible. Tuesday I gave my general Chef for OpenStack presentation linked above and we had a “DevOps Panel” later that day where there was an engaging discussion on the various issues facing deployers of OpenStack. I’ll link up videos as they become available.

Some short-term takeaways from the Summit where that there is a tremendous amount of development effort I was unaware of and the pace is about to pick up substantially. DreamHost and AT&T have a number of patches to be merged and work has already started on Folsom by several folks. The general consensus was to move the focus to Folsom now that it’s out, the cookbooks have been tagged and the repos have all been merged back to master. The ‘essex’ branches are working and have been pushed to the Community site for direct download and are still available of course if you want to continue development.

There were so many great discussions and ideas shared, I’m really looking forward to the work ahead. I’ll try to post more frequently, so the level of engagement will continue to get better.