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Comment by babarock | Hacker News Reader

Slightly relevant:

If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack[1]. It's a bash script that (git) pulls different projects of openstack into a machine and install them.

The script itself is very readable, thoroughly commented, on purpose. You're encouraged to read it while the whole thing installs (which can take several minutes).

Feel free to launch it inside of a VM (preferably running Ubuntu or Fedora), in order to avoid polluting your current system.

[1]: http://devstack.org/

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> If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack

You really shouldn't, unless you're interested in doing development work on the bleeding edge code in Git. Devstack is a development tool, not a deployment tool.

If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you would be much better off installing released, tested packages provided by your Linux distribution. It's true that there is still some setup work required, but there are many, many people working on tools to help with this:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Get_OpenStack

You can also use Vagrant+Devstack[1] to get started even quicker.

https://github.com/bcwaldon/vagrant_devstack

So, what, now you can virtualize while your virtualize? I thought the point of OpenStack was to be a way to manage VMs, isn't that also much of what Vagrant does?

I'd tend to avoid mixing the streams & go for a single node management system rather than attempt two at once- were it me. But I also am not invested in Vagrant, which people are free to enjoy, so if they can happily run both VM managers at once, so be it. Cool, I guess.

I would like some clarity on what exactly this hybrid achieves though- what is it's goal?

Testing new software in a VM is done primarily because (as stated above) you "avoid polluting your current system". When you are done or if anything goes wrong you can just trash the VM. This is standard practice in a variety of situations and has other benefits.

The only twist here is the software you are testing happens to be virtualization management software. Make sense?

One example of where this is very useful is for people not running Linux on their workstation. If I want to play with OpenStack or Docker or whatever, a VM is a nice playground for it, and Vagrant makes convenient VMs.

  >So, what, now you can virtualize while your virtualize?

Yo dawg... yes (in a way). You can have issues with the environment as is the case with most new things, but this way there's nothing you need to keep should you decide to start fresh or decide to do something differently. It simplifies things a whole lot.

I went with a somewhat more ready-made, native way of getting OpenStack- I installed my OS's packages of it. http://wiki.debian.org/OpenStack

It looks to me like both PayPal and HP Cloud are using http://saltstack.com/ to manage their OpenStack clusters.

Not in hpcloud. At least not the public cluster available via hpcloud.com

People can also check out http://trystack.org/ and SAIO (Swift all in One, a single node Swift cluster for development, testing, and learning) http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/development_saio.h...

I only have a few servers here and I would love to test open/dev stack here inside a VM, but the script keeps freezing :(

... I am not expecting to deploy or do much on virtual hardware, but, the servers are pretty beefy and I just want to muck around with the management and learn how it works so I can deploy it at a later date.

how does this compare to puppet?

devstack is a shell script.

It sets up openstack from source, tracking master.

It is what developers of openstack use to setup dev environments, run automated testing, ... There are also puppet and chef recipes that use packages (which is recommended for production deploys)

It's an alternative to puppet. Biggest difference is built-in remote execution.

Not exactly, it doesn't have the same goal at all.

From the first line of the script: "stack.sh is an opinionated OpenStack developer installation". It doesn't provide nearly the flexibility of Puppet (or Chef).

Devstack does one thing, and one thing (almost) only: get a simple installation of OpenStack up and running as fast as possible (predominantly for developers to test their modifications against).

Puppet can handle much more complex scenarios, and is really meant to deploy production.

Thanks. Will definitely check it out.

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