Recently, Crowbar's source was released under the Apache 2 license, and many developers are excited about the possibility of deploying an OpenStack Cloud Solution in a matter of hours instead of days.  Originally developed as an OpenStack installer by Dell's CloudEdge Solutions Team, it has quickly grown into a much more powerful tool, currently used as a wrapper for Opscode's Chef Server.

At Opscode, the integration of Crowbar, Chef, and Openstack...

...stretches the concept of infrastructure as code all the way from the bios to the provisioning of a private cloud... it's a 'datacenter as code'.

-- Damon Edwards

In this video, Matt Ray from Opscode discusses the integration process.



This, combined with barclamps, a feature of Crowbar, is designed to allow project managers and vendors to ensure that new products can be easily integrated into existing platforms.

The following video was created by Keith Hudgins from DTO Solutions as a short tour of Crowbar and Barclamps.



Recently, Rob Hirshfield posted a nice list of expected features for the upcoming Crowbar 1.3 release that includes:

1. Ubuntu 11.04 support!   Thanks to Justin Shepherd from Rackspace Cloud Builders!
2. Alias names for nodes in the UI
3. User managed node groups in the UI
4. Ability to pre-populate the alias, description and group for a node (not integrated with DNS yet)
5. Hadoop is working again – we addressed the missing Ganglia repo issue.  Thanks to Victor Lowther.
   
   -- Rob Hirshfield

This last video is an interview of Rob Hirshfield by Barton George discussing the Hadoop barclamp and more.



For more information on Crowbar, check out Rob Hirshfield's recent "FoodFight" podcast with Bryan Berry and Matt Ray.