Automated Deployment of and to OpenStack with Chef

Chef is an open source systems integration framework for automating the deployment of your entire infrastructure. OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies for delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system. Deploying OpenStack is a non-trivial effort, this talk will outline how Chef was used to automate deploying OpenStack Compute and Object Storage and then have the ability to deploy with Chef to the virtual private servers running on that infrastructure. Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers, technologists, researchers and corporations collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system. Developed by Opscode and a vibrant open source community, Chef is being used to automate and deploy large (and small) infrastructures all over the world. Both projects are freely available under the Apache 2.0 license so that anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the projects. A number of different companies collaborated on automating OpenStack deployments, including Rackspace, Opscode and Cloudscaling. The seeds for development for this collaborative project were sown at the OpenStack Design Summit in November 2010, where over 250 attendees from all over the world came together to plan future releases. Recognizing the need to make development and deployment of OpenStack easier, we started gathering requirements and documentation to automate the process. OpenStack is now deployable with Chef and is now a supported platform for automatically deploying cloud instances with Chef.