Welcome to OpenCrowbar

Welcome to the OpenCrowbar Project - the gateway to a new hardware provisioning experience that delivers the best of software deployment automation and orchestration. OpenCrowbar is a successor of the 3 year-old & still active Crowbar project. It derives much of its functionality from its predecessor, but offers a lot more.

Getting Started & Documentation

Documentation close by and located in under the /doc directory of OpenCrowbar and for each workload module.

Please refer to the /doc directories for detailed information. We attempt to define and maintain one sub-directory for each functional element. This structure is intended to be common across all workloads in the OpenCrowbar project

Please, do NOT add documentation in locations outside of the /doc directory trees! If necessary, expand this README to include pointers to important /doc information.

We've also made it easy to setup and run Crowbar using our Fast-Start (with Docker) as a rapid-fire code/test/commit cycle tool.

Join Our Community

• Live Weekly Planning and Design Meetings
• Mailing List
• #Crowbar IRC channel on Freenode

Exec Summary

The principal motivation for creation of OpenCrowbar is the transition a from bare metal installer into a tool that manages ongoing operations. OpenCrowbar enables upgrade and continuous deployment automation. This capability is important for large scale deployments of evolving complex projects like OpenStack, Hadoop, and Ceph.

OpenCrowbar provides the foundation for operations automation. OpenCrowabr is an open reference implementation that can be reliably deployed in large-scale, multi-site datacenters. This effectively productizes best practices in a way that allows cration of consistent and discoverable operating environments. Users benefit with fast time-to-value and we benefit by having consistent installations across the ecosystem.

Benefits of OpenCrowbar

OpenCrowbar reduces the cost of datacenter hardware infrastructure preparation. The immediate benefits of OpenCrowbar are realized in the deployment of complex compute and storage clusters. OpenCrowbar reduces the human resource cost of getting compute platform systems into productive use, automates continuous hardware redeployment, automates hypervisor, operating systems, and application layer software installation and management. All of these add up to significant gains in operational reliability, consistency, and concomitant reduction in defects handling costs.