Over the past year, Razor has shown that there is huge demand for a policy-driven, discovery-based provisioning solution for bare metal and virtualized hardware. Simply put, Razor is the tool of choice to go from zero to fully-installed, including handoff to Puppet, in the most flexible and DevOps friendly way. Based on our experience, we have revamped Razor significantly with an eye towards easier deployment and maintenance, more flexibility in describing the provisioning process, and more robust hardware support. This talk will explain what has changed (all the things that made Razor hard to deploy), what has stayed the same (all the cool features unique to Razor), and where we see Razor's journey going from here.

1. Razor
Provision like a boss
David Lutterkort
Principal Engineer | Puppet Labs
@lutterkort
lutter@puppetlabs.com

2. Who are you ?
• Joined Puppet Labs in May
• One of the first contributors to Puppet
• Started Augeas
• Apache Deltacloud, DMTF CIMI
• email: lutter@puppetlabs.com
• IRC: lutter, twitter: @lutterkort

3. Razor history
• Started by EMC/VMWare
• Nick Weaver, Tom McSweeney
• EMC World 2012
• PuppetConf 2012

6. Ingredients
• ipxe
• Hardware discovery and inventory
• Tagging and policies

7. Where is Razor going
• Rewrite for different stack
• Simplify deployment
• Simplify maintenance
• Simplify usage
Don’t muck with the good bits

8. The more it changes ...
• Node discovery with MK and facter
• Use ipxe to control boot
• Written in Ruby
• Flexible tag/rule-based policy match
• Simple handoff to Puppet
• Manage large number of nodes

9. Foundations

10. Aside: Torquebox rules
• Daemons
• Scheduled Jobs
• Messaging
• Clustering
• Integration with Java libraries
• Java management

11. Components
• Razor server
• Razor CLI
• Microkernel agent
• Microkernel image
• Razor UI

12. Microkernel
• Separate MK agent from OS image
• Build on EL
• well-known hardware support
• formal support offerings
• currently ~ 150MB (unoptimized)
• Enable alternative MK builds

13. Server API
• JSON everywhere
• Query objects with RESTful interface
• Update/modify using commands (CQRS)
• all changes happen async
• Authentication [TODO]

14. CLI
1> razor nodes
2> razor tags mytag
3> razor create-tag --name=any
--rule ‘[“=”, 1, 1]’
4> razor create-image --name=...
--image-url=...
5> razor create-policy --json policy.json

15. Tags
• A named rule
• Rules can have complex logic
[“or”,
[“in”, [“fact”, “macaddress”,
“de:ad:be:ef:00:01”,
“de:ad:be:ef:00:02”]],
[“=”, “2”, [“fact”, “processorcount”]]]

16. Policies
# policy.json
{
“name”: “fedora-for-any”,
“image”: { “name”: “fedora-19” },
“installer”: { “name”: “fedora-base” },
“broker”: { “name”: “puppet” },
“hostname”: “host${id}.example.com”,
“root_password”: “secret”,
“max_count”: 20,
“enabled”: true,
“line_number”: 100,
“tags”: [{ “name”: “any” }]
}

17. Installers
• OS installation inherently linear
• Completely in metadata
• file based or in DB
• Simple node/server API
• evaluate and fetch ERB template
• store a value (e.g., IP address)
• log a message

18. Installer example
---
# redhat.yaml
os: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
os_version: 6
description: Red Hat EL installer
boot_sequence:
1: boot_install
default: boot_local

19. Template example
# os_boot.erb
hostname <%= node.hostname %>
yum -y install rubygems facter
[ $? -eq 0 ] && curl <%= log_url(“ok”) %>
|| curl <%= log_url(“fail”, :error) %>
#!ipxe
# boot_install.erb
kernel <%= image_url(“/vmlinuz”) %>
ks=<%= file_url(“kickstart”) %>

20. The road forward
• Make release soon (~ 2 weeks)
• Add lifecycle management features
• Userdata for nodes
• Node commands
• Generate events

21. Possible node commands
• Boot locally
• Boot into MK
• register
• update facts
• BIOS/firmware update
• Reinstall OS
• Unbind & run through policy table

22. Event generation
• User-controlled actions (commands)
• Possible events
• node discovered
• policy bound
• installer finished
• policy unbound

23. Demo time

24. Don’t be a stranger
Github repos (will change)
Server: https://github.com/puppetlabs/razor-server
Microkernel: https://github.com/puppetlabs/razor-el-mk
Mailing list
http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-razor
IRC:
#puppet-razor (freenode)
My email: lutter@puppetlabs.com

25. Thank You
David Lutterkort
Principal Engineer | Puppet Labs
@lutterkort
Collaborate. Automate. Ship.

26. Follow us on Twitter @puppetlabs
youtube.com/puppetlabsinc
slideshare.net/puppetlabs
Collaborate. Automate. Ship.